Been thinking about this since I’ve been playing Rain World. I feel that Rain World is solidly within the genre. There are definitely video essays out there about it being about existing in an ecosystem or whatever. Pathologic is another obvious one. The original Dark Souls is probably paradigmatic of this category.
What traits define this category? I think:
- Difficult, you struggle to make progress
- Inscrutable narrative motivation
- Hidden depth to the world that can be teased out through intensive study
- Possible to find it fun, but much likelier to just bounce off (and watch the video essay instead!)
Is this a valid category?
this is a nonsense idea. please stop it with the video essay posts this is getting ridiculous.
As much as we love it, Disco is definitely like catnip for video essays.
Basically any game where the gameplay takes a backseat to the story, or the story is told through weird gameplay mechanics. Something like Ultrakill is a good one that skirts the line with good gameplay and an absolutely wild story.
99% of mascot horror
Antichamber. Love the game. Lots of hidden and obscured meaning and metaphors.
Any sort of live service game these days will inevitably either become the next big thing (5% chance) or become the next Anthem or FO76 therefore they’re fertile ground because you see, the year is 2024 and you really need to tell people why [insert current year live service game] learned nothing from the failures of the past decade.
The pain of remembering that Fallout 76 is still not dead
Gotta be Cruelty Squad, it’s too player hostile and interesting not to be.
Funnily enough, competitive fighting games such as Smash Bros, Tekken, and so on, are very prone to having 1h essays about the influence of a particular move in the history of the game’s competitive playing. Or Tetris.
Any game that delivers lore through item descriptions
A different type of video essay bait is the “you ever think about how you’re a bad person for playing this video game?” game, like Undertale, Spec Ops: the Line (though that one predates the modern video essay trend), or maybe Slay the Princess
you ever think about how you’re a bad person for playing this video game?
Slay the Princess
Killing royals is cool and good.
Those B-movie RPGs from Europe like Two Worlds: II and Gothic. They come so close to being good and have their own quirks.
Another is Indie boomer shooters and mods for the classics like the my house wad. But that could be me because boomer shooters are my favourite kinds of games
That’s Slavjank and Eurojank respectively
There are, I think, exactly two that haven’t been mentioned yet: Pathologic 1 and Immortality (2022), the former for being conceptually fascinating while borderline unplayable and then the much truer example, maybe the only true example here, Immortality for being a convoluted knot of kind of a plot held together by gameplay consisting of sifting endlessly through footage and nothing else.
Void Stranger but I am not sure if the essaybros have found it
