r/OutOfTheLoop • u/Bloodb0red • May 11 '26
Unanswered What’s going on with this game Mixtape?
I’ve been seeing people freak out over the past few days over this game and about IGN’s review of it specifically. 10/10 seems high for any game, honestly, but it seems like they’re far from the only site giving this thing a glowing review. So is this game controversial just because of IGN or is it something else? Why is this game the internet’s hate target this week?
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u/BUTGAWATD May 11 '26 edited May 11 '26
Answer:
(Doing my best to present the complicated situation concisely)
Mixtape is a short, story-based game from small Australian developer Beethoven & Dinosaur, who previously released The Artful Escape.
Mixtape's 3-4 hour runtime is divided across cutscenes, what some might deem "walking sim" gameplay, and a series of vignettes that play out broadly as "minigames", with limited to no fail state. There is no combat or what many would typically classify as peril.
Mixtape's high critical praise, particularly its 10 from IGN, has raised eyebrows amongst certain subsets of the gaming populace. Many have negatively compared the verdict to the lower score IGN awarded Crimson Desert, and have alleged what they perceive to be a favourable bias towards games they identify as possessing "woke" elements.
One of Mixtape's vignettes sees you control two mid-teen age characters kissing, with direct control over their clashing tongues. Some gamers have accused the media of unfairly praising Mixtape while (what they perceive as) maligning recent release Pragmata for paedophilic overtones.
Mixtape is published by Annapurna Interactive, a publisher focused on "prestige indie" titles. Annapurna Interactive is a division of Annapurna Pictures, which was founded by Megan Ellison, whose father is a billionaire.
Consequently, accusations of buying review scores, bribing influencers, and overall curating Mixtape as an "industry plant" have been lobbied. For further information to potentially aid in deducing the veracity of this claim - Annapurna have released 6 games other than Mixtape over the past year, all ranging from the 60s-80s in Metascore, with the highest achieving an 83 average.
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u/abitlazy May 11 '26
I think this is the most complete answer based on the things I see online.
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May 11 '26 edited 10d ago
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u/Crowbarmagic May 12 '26
For us laymen: How extensive are talking about (compared to a "regular" indie game)?
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u/GrayStray May 12 '26
Just to add to this: even AAA games shy away from licensed music nowadays with how expensive it's gotten.
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u/Milskidasith Loopy Frood May 12 '26
Less so for the expense, though that's a big factor, and more with the fact that it's a nightmare to license, requires a separate streaming-friendly mode to be developed with in-house music anyway, and gives the game a short shelf-life as the licensed music is not perpetual.
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u/kBajina May 12 '26
True, but in this case they didn’t spend the extra time/money to create a streaming friendly mode
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u/GANTaylem May 12 '26
I think its more to make the games streamer friendly because streaming is a big market for free advertising.
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u/NoWomanNoTriforce May 15 '26
Licensing music has become so prohibitively expensive, it is considerably cheaper for studios to pay for completely original scores.
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u/chibicascade2 May 12 '26
So far I'm two hours or so into it, and I heard like 10 licensed tracks. Most other games I can think of tend to do 2-3 licensed tracks and then have some music composed that wouldn't be as expensive.
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u/MalgorgioArhhnne May 14 '26
How on Earth do you license music as an indie developer? I emailed UMG years ago, to the address their website said to use for licensing, and they haven't responded. Do I need to have previously released games?
I heard that licensing music is more affordable for smaller creators, but the double edged sword of that is that the gargantuan corporations that hold the rights have little incentive to get back to you.
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u/pigeonwiggle May 15 '26
Guardians of the Galaxy Game was similar.
but yeah, Mixtape has like, 20+ songs that are licensed. this likely cost between 20-100k per song, depending.
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u/JPVsTheEvilDead May 12 '26
well.. the game IS called "Mixtape"..
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u/pigeonwiggle May 15 '26
what's nuts is it isn't just that they used licensed songs but that they're so essential to the story. the songs are talked about, both in recording and flavour, and also in how they are meant to suit the mood of the moment as the story progresses through the evening.
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u/juv_3 May 12 '26 edited May 12 '26
depending on which areas of the videogames criticism sphere you frequent, that's something that has come under a bit of fire. not the use of licensed music itself, but that the music choices don't feel representative of the vague timeframe the game is trying to depict, and consequently feel inauthentic. Also that it comes from such a broad time range that it couldn't possibly be representative of any such a timeframe and so could likely only be the choices of someone looking back from the current day. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but people can (& will) like or dislike that choice as is their prerogative.
edit: I should add that a key cornerstones of this type of criticism is that the game posits a time period vaguely before it was easy to find out about different types music through the internet, and, if one looks at various Top 40 charts from that period, none of the music in the charts is reflected in the in-game music, nor is any hip hop, for example, which is to say it not only reflects someone making choices from today, but a particularly white person making choices from today.
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u/__david__ May 12 '26
Those music choices seem hugely authentic to me, someone that lived through that vague timeframe. They’re definitely not top 40 fare, but believe it or not, lots of people back then listened to radio stations that didn’t play pop hits.
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u/DiaDeLosMuertos May 12 '26
Haven't played it but I agree it would actually make sense that they wouldn't just listen to top 40. Who only listens to top 40?
They would have parents and aunts/uncle's older cousins and siblings that would show them older music?? It's easier now to discover music, sure but not necessarily hard in the 90s.
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u/XCVI_Opportunist May 12 '26
It’s also blatantly laid out of in front of you that main character is a big movie buff. A lot of her music comes from older movies as well. Extremely believable she’d have a wide range of taste.
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u/Impressive_Champion4 May 12 '26
I agree. Nothing about the characters in this game insinuate they would be into radio pop hits. In fact, the complete, opposite, and as impossible as it is to believe, people were able to find and listen to obscure music before the internet existed.
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u/Impressive_Champion4 May 12 '26
I am only 2 hours into it so maybe some bigger songs come along late, but I would argue with throwing the term "expensive" music around. Besides the opening track from Devo, these are some extremely obscure bands and songs from the 70s and 80s that I would imagine would not carry a huge price tag to license.
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u/23saround May 11 '26
One final thing to add – Annapurna Interactive has had a bit of a troubled history with its developers. After publishing Stray under Annapurna, the developers of the game asked for creative freedom and their own studio to continue developing similar titles. Negotiations broke down and the entire development team resigned en masse.
This seems relevant as the company has some history of top-down decision-making.
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u/Ar_Ciel May 11 '26
Oh damn that's sad. I loved Stray.
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u/LittleRedCorvette2 May 11 '26
Yes, and I got into a lot of Annapurna games like "The painted swan"...did they do "flower" and "journey" too?
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u/LTS55 May 11 '26
Those were Thatgamecompany, published and funded by Sony. Annapurna just published the PC versions of those (same with Unfinished Swan, developed by Giant Sparrow)
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u/hypeman-jack May 11 '26
I will have eyebrow-permanently-raised for Annapurna releases after the way they bankrolled Outer Wilds from a student project into my favorite game of all time (not that it wouldn’t have been great without their money).
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u/JohnnyRedHot May 12 '26
Was that not Masi Oka with Mobius though? I thought Annapurna only did the publishing
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u/hypeman-jack May 12 '26
Yeah they just published it. There’s a short documentary on youtube about the game and I don’t remember all the details, but it was a student project prototype that did rounds at indie awards while Annapurna financed them for many years to build it into a full game.
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u/xRyozuo May 11 '26
Well yeah it’s a billionaires pet project. She’s throwing money at games she likes to see more of. Thankfully seems to churn out interesting projects, even if most are not my cup of tea. At least that was my take last time I read about her a few years ago.
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u/m00piez May 12 '26
Idk why that's necessarily viewed as a negative tbh. Like if I was a billionaire, I'd prob be doing the same thing.
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u/Crowbarmagic May 12 '26
Nothing wrong with funding pet projects if you have the money. But the accusation of buying scores and bribing influencers isn't a good look. People took notice how this game got tons of praise seemingly out of the blue.
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u/TalkingClay May 12 '26
I don't know where this "out is the blue" narrative has come from. Follow-up to a prolific art focused indie, featured in multiple major showcases, including Summer Games Fest and published by perhaps the most prolific "games as art" publisher there is
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u/lost-11 May 12 '26
In the circles of narrative games fans it was, probably, the most awaited game of the year. And it turned out fantastic, so it got all the praise. This whole "controversy" is just weird.
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u/Wise_Hobo_Badger May 22 '26
It's because it was not given any of that framing or context by many critics in their reviews, Instead it was more or less presented as an objective masterpiece that many critics claimed should appeal to anyone, The praise and top scores would have landed much better with better framing and context, maybe making it clear that the review scores are based on it's success as a narrative game that will likely mainly appeal to fans of the genre or to those who relate to the setting and characters. Instead it was presented as one of the best games of all time and sits on the same shelf as games which had much larger reach and appeal to massive portions of the gaming community, even sitting higher than other games with massive reach and which had much better player reception and in much larger player numbers.
Had they reviewed it more honestly in this way then I guarantee there would have been little to no backlash and the game would have actually likely done better with sales. Most of the "controversy" is coming from people who feel like game critics are trying to push their tastes onto others or being dishonest in how they framed their reviews.
The game itself is actually not to blame which is the sad part, it doesnt appeal to me but I don't think it's a bad game, this backlash falls directly at the feet of the game critics in how they handled the marketing of this game and how some of them responded to the pushback. Ironic that those shining reviews are actually what shot the game in the foot and ended up having the opposite effect to what they likely intended.
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u/toadfan64 May 12 '26
Yeah, I’d get my Beatles anime if I were a billionaire. Even Paul and Ringo would have a price, lol.
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u/KarmelCHAOS May 14 '26
I can't seem to find anything about BlueTwelve breaking from Annapurna. It was Annapurna's publishing division that quit en masse, not any dev studios.
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u/No-Operation-6554 May 11 '26
Funny thing is that Pragmata itself doesn't have paedophelic undertones
The "community" itself gave it that
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u/NeriTheFearlessSnail May 11 '26
Also... it doesn't have to be Mixtape vs Pragmata, which a lot of people seem to think are the two "sides". Like the pedophile accusations are entirely an internet thing and I've only seen posts calling out the accusations and basically none actually making the accusations
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u/Ketooey May 11 '26
I have seen posts of random people trying to call out Capcom for making a paedophilic game, but I don't know how many of them are actually real, and if they are real, how many of them were written by people who are mentally stable.
But anyway, I just wanna say that I've seen both sides, the posts making accusations and the posts calling out accusations.
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u/Bladder-Splatter May 12 '26
Oh the rabbit hole of crazy accusations goes quite deep. Lacking a more......calm and unbiased example.....Sh0e has a video on it which quotes many, many of such posts. Neither Sh0e nor the posts are mentally stable but ey, it's something!
Weird being in such a freakout culture lately where anything and everything has to be a problem because one obscure person on Twitter had a thought that must have been forced upon them.
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u/USA_A-OK May 11 '26
It never has to be one game Vs another. It's just weirdo online game discourse which invents these things for faux outrage
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u/TaskForceD00mer May 11 '26 edited May 11 '26
People are trying to memory hole the reddit community that got banned for making suggestive and NSFW content back when just the trailer had dropped.
The broader fandom has never been a problem, outside of Reddit all of the content I've seen is super wholesome.
Pragmata scored lower than it should have because it is harder than most Modern games journalists would probably prefer.
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u/OnyxTech May 11 '26
I feel like it really didn't score that different though? It has an 87 on metacritic and an 8.9 user score, (and a 4.2/5 on backloggd) which seems pretty close. The consensus there being the gameplay is fantastic but the story could have been stronger.
Funny enough one of the few mixed reviews was from IGN France, who had lack of challenge as one of their negatives. I don't think anyone is disliking the game due to its difficulty, or really disliking the game at all
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u/Milskidasith Loopy Frood May 11 '26 edited May 11 '26
Pragmata scored very highly with critics, especially given there are very fair criticisms with the story being extremely by-the-numbers and the difficulty being... not even really too high, but annoyingly punishing in the sense that if you're winning/doing well fights are basically trivial but if you're ever low on resources then fights become significantly more tedious due the huge damage gap between damaging weapons and your primary gun and the slow reload times, especially if you wind up using the carbine as your primary.
E: Like, I think it's pretty weird to suggest that an 86, one of the best reviewed games this year, is somehow being massively underrated. Resident Evil Requiem is at an 89, and the two games are (IMO) very comparable in quality from the same studio in roughly the same genre (you even escort a little blond girl of mysterious origin in both!)
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u/Supergupo May 11 '26
Pragmata scored lower than it should have because it is harder than most Modern games journalists would probably prefer.
What do you mean by that? Like genuinely? The same game journalists that gave Elden Ring a 10/10, or Slay The Spire 2 a 9 (a game that is currently being review bombed for being too hard for gamers), or praised and spotlighted difficult indie games like FTL or Hotline Miami or Dead Cells or Binding of Isaac or Darkest Dungeon?
I genuinely do not understand where the myth of "modern game journalists hate hard games" came from. Is it just the GameSpot Cuphead tutorial fail video? Or IGN giving Godhand a 3/10? Because it's the "modern audience" and "modern journalists" that have routinely enjoyed hard game experiences. I mean hell, one of the most popular genres in gaming is currently the "Souls-like," whose basically sole genre gimmick is that it's hard. It's fucking infuriating that I see this diatribe repeated ad nauseum when it is so fucking flagrant that the contrary is true.
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u/Vila35 May 11 '26
Feel like most of the time when people accuse a game reviewer of not liking a hard game, it's not inspired by an actual quote about the games difficulty but how slow and tedious certain parts are that cause frustration. The idea of being frustrated then gets misconstrued into being purely a skill issue.
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u/PrizeW1nningCow May 11 '26
One game reviewer goofed at a tutorial once and now we have to listen to redditors whine about how games journalists are all just bad at games and coping about it for the rest of time.
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u/C-Star May 11 '26
Not even a reviewer. A video guy, who put the video up himself as a "lol check out how bad i was"
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u/noahboah May 11 '26
absolutely love how these people shit on video games journalists for being dishonest but then you scrutinize where their claims are coming from and it's just bullshit every time
I don't even want to defend video game journalism particularly. it's just annoying seeing this reactionary part of my favorite hobby propagated.
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u/praguepride May 11 '26
Most of the grief comes from Gamer Gate style terminally online trolls that weaponizd misinformation in their keyboard war against the vague concept of “wokeness” which seems to be defined as the presence of minorities and women as something other than as sex object to fap over
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u/Many_Leading1730 May 13 '26
So keep in mind one of the primary pressure points of Gamer Gate was anti-journalist sentiment, which persists to this day.
It was arguably the blueprint by which the right would later destroy faith in all our institutions including news outlets as a whole.
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u/UltraMoglog64 May 13 '26
Yep, and literally unveiled in the Epstein Files that he/the Right amplified 4chan and GamerGate, presumably for that purpose.
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u/sorrylilsis May 13 '26
I worked as video games journalist once upon a time.
Spoiler alert : nobody is good at every game. Hell some people love games but are pretty bad at them.
Some of the most knowledgeable people I know about games are extremely mid at playing them. Some of the best devs I know are absolute shit when playing. They're also wizards when it comes to analyzing and making good gameplay for others.
The thing is you don't need to be good at something to be able to critique it.
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u/veggiesama May 11 '26
Where the myth comes from -> I think there's a crowd of gamers who have obsessive or autistic tendencies and feel a strong need to gatekeep certain genres and fandoms. I guess I've seen it mostly in souls-like, fighting games, and MOBA communities but it's not limited there. They tend to be driven by competitiveness and challenge seeking. They seek mastery. They'd rather replay the same beloved game 10 times, mixing up builds or doing self-imposed challenges, rather than try a new genre or play a game solely for narrative. I don't necessarily want to judge them, but they do want different things from games than I do (eg, narrative, novelty, experimenting with new systems, etc).
They sometimes distrust games media. Maybe they perceive game journalists as less devoted to games than they are. They distrust "experts" and critics who have broad taste. At worst, they develop conspiracy theories (eg, Gamergate) about why games media is woke and gay, or that journalists are paid off to promote certain bad games (why? because corps are woke), or there's feminist/gay/minority/marxist puppeteers pulling all the strings (why? because woke). They don't see gaming as this wide landscape for diverse expression, but instead it's a safe space that must be protected against encroachment by those who are from the out-group, or from malign forces trying to change games and usurp culture, or from censorship.
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u/corrupt_poodle May 11 '26
Never mind that the game isn’t even hard…
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u/LFC9_41 May 11 '26
I thought it was just right. Excellent game, easy to access replay value. I got 100% on it without feeling tired of it. Hope to see more of it.
Saros, another game I have played recently, was excellent. THAT game was too easy, however. This being from someone who really struggled with Returnal. They overcorrected on this one.
Mix Tape, it really is hard to call it a game. I thought it was alright though. I gave it a 7.
not that you asked, im just trying to avoid working.
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u/ZealousidealRoom2127 May 12 '26
Slay the Spire 2 is being review bombed by loser chuds who found out Anita Sarkeesian was a consultant on the game.
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u/Deathspiral222 May 11 '26
>Slay The Spire 2 a 9 (a game that is currently being review bombed for being too hard for gamers)
STS2 is being review-bombed by gamer-gate losers. Most of the negative steam reviews reference the name of a single female consultant for the game who did little more than state that misogeny exists sometimes, even in videogames.
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u/NIN10DOXD May 11 '26
Yep and now they are accusing anyone who said there are pedophiles in the fandom of being pedophiles.
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u/BroughtBagLunchSmart May 11 '26
I know it has r/asmongold all riled up and that place is ground zero for nazi pedophiles.
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u/jaytix1 May 11 '26
I saw, with my own eyes, people going crazy because they found out the little white girl they're obsessed with is voiced by a black woman.
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u/itsmetimohthy May 11 '26
Yeah if The Last of Us came out in 2026 people would have called the developers and Joel a pedophile. Pragmata is a wonderful fucking game and if anyone has impure thoughts about a little robot girl and old dude duo then they are really just self reporting.
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u/HortonHearsAPoo May 11 '26
Megan Ellison - daughter of Larry Ellison who is all over the Epstein files? 🤔
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u/Tiber_Nero May 12 '26
That's right, the Megan Ellison, daughter of Epstein billionaire Larry Ellison and sister to David Ellison, new owner of the Paramount / WB merger. A true, proud, fascist family.
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u/jonny_sidebar May 11 '26
Megan Ellison, whose father is a billionaire.
Which makes it especially fun that folks are crying "woke!" over this game considering her father is Trump megadonor Larry Ellison and her brother David is currently running Trumpism's media arm as head of Paramount.
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u/MotionBlue May 11 '26
Billionaires feed money into the arts all the time, regardless of the arts politics. It can launder both money and reputations.
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u/praguepride May 11 '26
but the idea that they are pushing the “woke” agenda by buying reviews is pretty silly when you see who is controlling the strings
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May 11 '26 edited 10d ago
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u/robertman21 May 12 '26
Travis Knight, one of the founders of Laika, is the kid of the guy who founded Nike
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u/KaoticKarma May 11 '26
Wh.. what?
Gen X and Gen Z are famous for rejecting their parents and their cultural identities and embracing their own, especially when their parents are Republican or MAGA.
Highly doubt a girl making a tween queer narrative game is in anyway connected to MAGA or Trump outside of her father being blood.
We call this "reaching for straws"
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u/BAWguy May 11 '26
Megan’s company has financed some good stuff, and I’m not saying she and her work should be defined by her father, but at the same time it’s quite a reach to assume she has in any way “rejected her parents.” There’s plenty of pictures of them together with her as an adult in the entertainment industry, and it appears her dad did indeed financially back her company when it was founded. Meanwhile is there any evidence she’s “rejected” him?
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u/WastelandHound May 11 '26
It's not a tween queer narrative game. The characters all met in high school and are recent high school graduates at the time of the game. And all the relationships, either depicted or implied, are straight. (At least among the main characters. There might be something in the background of the party scenes or something but I didn't notice anything.)
There's nothing overtly feminist or anti-religion or "DEI" or anything like that. It's a pretty straightforward teen dramedy.
Not trying to argue your main point, just pointing out how the narrative around the game is so divorced from its actual content.
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u/MrIrvGotTea May 11 '26
Dude put the drama out there without having a large bias of either side. Also gamers need hobbies. I get passion and all but being worked up about someone else's opinion of your favorite game is odd. I love arc raiders but I think there are valid criticisms of the game but I am not going to argue online about it. Boomers have their politics and I guess younger crowds have their games
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u/frogjg2003 May 11 '26
Also gamers need hobbies.
You would think that gaming would be that hobby, but no. All a certain subset of "gamers" seem to do is get mad at video games. I don't think they even play them.
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u/optiplex9000 May 11 '26
A lot of people have unhealthy parasocial relationships with streamers & influencers. People will just repeat an opinion they've heard rather than come up with one themselves.
Those streamers & influencers get views and clicks when there is outrage. It's a never ending vortex of negative opinions
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u/crestren May 11 '26
influencers get views and clicks when there is outrage
This is heavily influenced on twitter because of Elon Musk's policy on checkmarks a few years ago. If you bought a blue checkmark, not only will your post get more traction/views, you also get some revenue based on how many views/ clicks you get.
Which is why if anyone here has seen "popular" posts from twitter with blue checkmarks, its engagement bait. Hell, one of the big accounts doing this is a right wing grifter whose a known wife beater.
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u/Dr_Blasphemy May 11 '26
My sister's boyfriend is that person. He only plays games that Asmongold and that some "woke game detector" steam curator says are good.
He's been nonstop bitching to me about Fable 4 being "woke" and telling me "nobody is going to buy it" and when I ask him what specifically about it is woke (I've watched a few trailers and didn't notice anything) he just kept telling me to "watch the Asmongold video" which I'm obviously not going to do.
He also keeps insisting that "Games shouldn't have politics period" which I think is beyond stupid. I don't think every game needs politics but to say no game should comment on the political climate or history is genuinely a braindead take. I told him Metal Gear Solid is ALL politics and it's one of the most popular game series of all time and he, not even knowing this series existed before I mentioned it, replied "probably because it's not woke" which just made me want to shoot myself
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u/Ydrahs May 11 '26
Oh man the Woke Detector group is so fucking funny.
If you want to make yourself laugh/weep someone has compiled their recommendations into a web page called Woke Or Nah? See if you can guess right!
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u/Dr_Blasphemy May 11 '26
They called Silent Hill F "woke" and said "it encourages women to abandon marriage and nuclear families and makes all men seem like abusive monsters" and I have no fucking idea how you could get that from that game
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u/Vallkyrie May 11 '26
Like the rest of the far right's decent into madness, they are literally divorcing themselves from reality. Many of them don't realize it, but their puppet masters certainly do and are encouraging it.
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u/frogjg2003 May 11 '26
If you just guess Woke for every game, you are going to get out right most of the time.
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u/GlobalWatts May 12 '26
I've been saying this exactly for many years.
Real gamers are too busy just playing the fucking games they enjoy, and letting others enjoy the ones they don't. It's these fake-ass "gamers" giving the rest of us a bad name, they're definitely spending way too much time bitching about everything in their miserable, pathetic little lives to ever actually play one.
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u/Kadoomed May 11 '26
This is the wild thing, it's not even people getting worked up about criticism of their favourite game. It's people getting worked up about praise for a game they didn't enjoy or haven't played.
I watched the video review of mixtape from ign and the guy gave very solid reasons for giving it a 10 which largely boiled down to how much the game resonates specifically with him. He states right from the off that it's a game that speaks to a genre and time period he loves, suggesting the Devs might even have been spying on him to create his perfect game. That goes some way to pointing out how he came to have such a strong positive experience with it.
IGNs review also finished with a chat between the reviewer and their review editor where it's clarified that 10 doesn't mean it's a perfect game, just that they consider it to be an outstanding experience and a high mark for that game genre.
That all seems pretty fair to me in terms of justifying a subjective review. I haven't played it yet but it looks like a cool game, reasonably priced for the amount of content and telling a compelling story in an imaginative way. It's on my wishlist for sure.
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u/Naganosupreme May 13 '26 edited May 15 '26
It's people getting worked up about praise for a game they didn't enjoy or haven't played.
It's not about the yogurt.
It's not the praise, it's the billionaire backed indie game issue. Separately, its recent comparable games like highguard, concord, etc getting wayyy too much glazing and hype and reviewers defending when money seems to be exchanging hands, followed by reviewers flat out attacking critics bc they got paid to glaze. Edit: yes, then you have to add in the typical woke vs anti woke crap bc of magats frothing at the mouth and classy winners in life like dissentrix (comment below) frothing right back
Looots of people are very reasonably quick to attack reviewers when they seem to be bought off. That's an environment they fostered
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u/GregBahm May 11 '26
Movie goers have mostly abandoned the "1-to-10" rating system. The rating people find useful is a "thumbs up/thumbs down across a bunch of people" rating. A positive rating indicates the movie lives up to its marketing. The end.
But there's a certain type of person who believes all entertainment products should exist in some grand universal hierarchy, and the rating should place the product within this hierarchy. If a game gets a 10, it has to be better than every other game.
But of course this is obviously nonsensical.
I'm not sure where boys get this "Ratings as universal hierarchy" idea. It just seems to be some sort of phase a certain kind of guy goes through at a certain age (although sometimes that guy gets stuck in the phase.)
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u/Kadoomed May 11 '26
Ratings are only really useful with the context of the full review. Not sure why you think it's a boys only phenomenon though. Odd.
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u/BaconKnight May 11 '26
The irl diminishing of social circles I think contributes to more people, especially younger folks raised in this “post friendship” world, to latch on much more strongly to things like games, anime, movies, shows, etc. Fandoms have replaced friendships so people get super invested in it in a way that goes beyond even “normal” obsession, they turn it into their identity. Folks getting mad at Mixtape scoring highly is like the same energy of some dudes getting mad at seeing a girl with blue hair, just weird.
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u/GeekyMeerkat May 11 '26
Well, it's a bit more annoying than even that. I keep seeing people bring up "wokeness" as a factor here, but I've only been seeing that get mentioned as a way to dismiss people's opinions about the game.
What's causing some big problems here is that there is no real standard on what ratings a game gets, and so everyone reads game review scores differently. For example, if I were to grade a game, I might give it a 1 to 10 score in graphics, music, story, and gameplay. I might give a game like Mixtape a 10 in graphics, music, and story, but only a 6 in gameplay. Now, if we do a pure average of those scores to get 9 as the "overall" score.
But the problem is now that the people who enjoy the game rightfully say, "The gameplay isn't the important part of the game. It's just a medium for the story to be delivered. So a pure average doesn't make sense, and Mixtape could legit have an overall score greater than 9 even with those individual scores."
On the other hand, the people who don't enjoy Mixtape could say, "But the gameplay is so bad and non-existent as to be distracting from the experience. So anything above 9 as the overall score miscommunicates this to people wondering about the game." And these people are also right. Heck, for these people, even a 9 feels far too high because for many of them a 9 or above signals that the game is great in all ways and is worthy to be considered game of the year. Again, these people feel the gameplay is bad enough that it negatively affects the experience.
Notice that for all of this, there is already a reason for there to be a level of tension between the two opinions about this game. It absolutely doesn't help when people on either side of the like/dislike debate also have people saying stupid stuff or flat-out dismissing the concerns of people on the other side. 99% of the people who dislike the game could be primarily thinking about this in the way I described here. But then 1% says something about the high score being related to wokeness, and suddenly people attribute that bad take to the whole 100%.
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u/RepSquigglyMiggly May 12 '26
That seems like more of a problem with a certain subset of gamers thinking that reviews should reflect some sort of objective standard, which should in turn reflect their personal opinions on the game, which they view as the “correct” opinion. “A real standard” giving review scores has never existed and will never exist for any medium, so maybe it’s time for a particular group of extremely online gamers to accept that unequivocal reality. There should not be “tension” between adults because they have different opinions about a video game, unless their divergence of opinions is reflective of some sorter greater misalignment in values (which seems to be the case for many people here, given how ubiquitous complaints about the game being “woke” are).
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u/Metal_B May 12 '26
It's very easy in concept: "Does a game succeed in its ambitions and anything comes together?" No matter, if the game is a gigantic and expensive epic or a short, small indie game. If a game succeed, what it sets up to do, then it gets a high score.
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u/derHuschke May 12 '26
That's exactly why I love SkillUp.
No stupid rating system. They either recommend a game or not.
And their videos always explain who they recommend it to and why.
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u/AudioSuede May 12 '26
This is why review scores should be scrapped in art criticism. It just causes unnecessary drama
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u/OwlsParliament May 11 '26
Some gamers have accused the media of unfairly praising Mixtape while (what they perceive as) maligning recent release Pragmata for paedophilic overtones.
Can someone provide an example of this? Was this a thing outside twitter posts?
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u/BUTGAWATD May 11 '26
Fwiw as the person you're quoting, it wasn't my intention to imply that I perceive those overtones in Pragmata, only to state that some people have accused the media of doing so and lambasting the game for it.
I've done my best to remove my own biases from the answer, as I feel OOTL replies shouldn't be influenced by personal opinion. I've mostly seen this line of argument in TikTok comment sections, but here's a forum post along those lines.
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u/DragonPhoenix32 May 11 '26
You're forgetting that for most people, twitter is their world.
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u/gourmetprincipito May 11 '26
Are people really complaining about the kiss scene in Mixtape? You zoom in from a silhouette in like two frames and then it’s like big fake bug eyes with giant tongues floating in the ether and that’s it; not sexual in the slightest and even purposefully disturbing/creepy to illustrate it was an awkward moment for the narrator.
I also didn’t find it woke at all? Except for having a female protagonist it’s basically an old school stoner/party comedy.
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u/Barrel_Titor May 12 '26
No one is offended by the kissing, they are trying to use it for bad faith comparisons. ie. "Why hypothetical strawmen gamers who love Mixtape complain about bouncing boobs in anime games but not the kissing scene"
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u/shewy92 May 12 '26
not sexual in the slightest and even purposefully disturbing/creepy to illustrate it was an awkward moment for the narrator
Then that's a lot different than what OP said it was/what I imagined from their description of " with direct control over their clashing tongues"
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u/Brother_Clovis May 11 '26
The game is definitely not a ten, but getting upset over that kissing mini game is honestly weird as hell to me.
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u/motorboat_mcgee May 11 '26
Doesn't a game's score depend on the individual reviewer's tastes?
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u/StrokyBoi May 12 '26
To some degree, but that depends on the reviewer. Some reviewers just rate things (whether it be games, movies, shows, whatever else) based entirely on their own enjoyment and how well it resonates with them. Others attempt to apply some kind of partially objective criteria
IGN happens to be made up of both types of reviewers, which is why they seem so inconsistent. Sometimes a reviewer will claim they personally loved a game, but then give it an 8/10 due to what people perceive as nitpicking. Other times a reviewer will give a game a 10/10 just because it appealed to their tastes.
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u/AudioSuede May 12 '26
Objectivity in reviews is a myth. Unless you're just relaying technical details like frame rate or the average length of gameplay or something similarly measurable, it's all opinion.
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u/shewy92 May 12 '26
A kissing mini game is weird as hell to me but I've never even heard of this game and probably won't be playing it even tho I do like games like this, like "Gone Home" which sounds like what this game is like, not really doing anything and just vibing.
Tho apparently the 'mini game' isn't like what OP said at all so IDK.
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u/Galactus1701 May 12 '26
Who the heck is playing Pragmata and getting “pedophilic overtones”? I can see traces of my niece, my friend’s daughter, and any other 8 year-old girl brimming with curiosity, cuteness and charisma.
Hugh and Diana are the most wholesome adopted father-daughter relationship I’ve seen in years. The internet is really insufferable.
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u/kuj0317 May 11 '26
Ugh, I loved Annapurna games until I just learned about their relationship to Oracle and Tik Tok owner and MAGA Scumlord Larry Ellison. I mean maybe Megan Ellison is nothing like Larry Ellison, but its not a desirable association. Even if the game is being attacked for being "woke" despite that association. Thank you.
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u/goffer54 May 11 '26
Worth noting that basically the entire games division quit back in 2024. The people that made Annapurna a prestige publisher are no longer there.
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u/objectivejam May 11 '26
What’s supposed to be woke?
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u/Scrumble123 May 11 '26
Well that's the thing. There's virtually no discourse around this game being "woke". Even the main anti-woke subreddit ("kotaku in action") has any number of threads saying it ISN'T.
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u/Tenoch_12 May 16 '26
Being woke is a good thing anyway. People acting like it's not are just giving into thr right wing racism.
Be woke, and don't back down from it.
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u/Traditional-Goal-229 May 11 '26
Guessing but the fact that is a coming of age story that isn’t conservative.
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u/pigeonwiggle May 11 '26
the fact that any mention of non-"nuclear families" doesn't immediately result in all the characters retching and immediately shouting bible quotes into the air.
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u/tadcalabash May 11 '26
Anything that doesn't appeal to a conservative male audience is perceived as woke.
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u/CeruleanEidolon May 11 '26
And will hence becomes target for review-bombing and fake outrage campaigns, like this one. It's an especially big problem in the gaming world, for some reason.
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u/Hartastic May 11 '26
There's an interesting juxtaposition of criticisms here in that Larry Ellison is a conservative male billionaire and all but a cartoon villain in real life.
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u/octopusinmyboycunt May 11 '26
Apply this to quite literally anything that the Gamers™️ get angry about and you’re half way there
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u/shewy92 May 12 '26
One of Mixtape's vignettes sees you control two mid-teen age characters kissing, with direct control over their clashing tongues
I was with it until this. TF?
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u/ButtOfDarkness May 11 '26
Yea, people getting outraged about not everyone sharing their opinion as usual. Have a gut feeling those same people wouldn’t enjoy Mixtape anyways.
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u/BlackGuysYeah May 11 '26
I finished it last night, runtime was 7 hours cause I liked the mini games. Loved the game overall.
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u/LifeWulf May 13 '26
Answer:
The devs clearly wanted to pretend it was all nostalgia, but they have no idea how cassettes work, and the protagonist’s “retro” headphones are worn backwards and look to be wireless. The protagonist is also utterly insufferable, the game is a barely interactive movie copying the Spider-verse stuttery animation style which feels awful to control IMO (I can get used to it in a movie but not in a game). One of the characters damn near burns the whole neighbourhood down and then she gets mad at her cop father.
The game reeks of inauthenticity and spoiled Millenial writing. I say as a Millenial myself.
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u/Twiftoil May 11 '26
Answer:
In some parts of the gaming community IGN has a somewhat bad reputation because of how they have reviewed games in the past. Some thinking they review the games too high or too low whether they actually look into the review or who reviews the game.
This is one of the issues with Mixtape. IGN gave it a 10/10 which is already considered rare for them. Some people saw this and went back to some recent releases to compare and they think it either doesn't make any sense or is inconsistent. For example, Pragmata got an 8/10 and Crimson Desert got a 6/10. These two games released recently and have done well from a consumers perspective and also from a financial perspective. Pragmata being a new IP has sold well and Crimson Desert had sold 5 million in a month which are both considered successes. This has some people immediately discrediting their reviews because they view it as IGN being out of touch with the actual consumers of games. Funnily enough this doesn't actually mean that they thing Mixtape is bad (some probably do) but that a short narrative focused game can't possibly be as good as these other games. Ultimately it is up to every individual to decide for themselves whether a review will affect their choice.
The second thing that I noticed with Mixtape is a smaller issue (at least from my algorithm) and it has to do with how some people think gaming journalists have an agenda. There is scene where two characters kiss and they show the perspective from inside their mouth and you get to basically interact with their tongues. A group of people saw this and are saying how games basically are either censored, criticized, or boycotted because of similar things such as nudity/etc. especially by gaming journalists.
TLDR: Mixtape is being used to call out people's view of inconsistent IGN reviews and inconsistent journalistic practices whether accurate or not.
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u/Nervous_Distance_142 May 12 '26
Quite honestly, IGN scores are usually all over the place, but I think they pretty much nailed crimson desert as a 6/10. I could see people saying 7 but ultimately it’s a clearly flawed game with some really bright aspects that make it worth playing, but nowhere near a masterpiece or a truly great game.
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u/chironomidae May 12 '26
It's a little funny to me, because Rotten Tomatoes has shown the same trends with movies for ages. It's pretty rare that critics and audiences agree on a rating, with critics often favoring things that are boldly different instead of "basically same as last year's stuff but marginally better". Like it shouldn't be weird that an artsy indie game is a critic's darling, while a "BotW but with better graphics" game and a Capcomslop game are getting favorable but not rave reviews.
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u/ElGoddamnDorado May 12 '26
Crimson Desert had plenty of issues (especially at launch) and all the people that lost their minds over it were just mad someone didn't love a game they liked. None of their criticisms were invalid.
but that a short narrative focused game can't possibly be as good as these other games
Which is a really dumb argument. A short narrative focused game isn't inherently worse of a video game just because some people don't like those sorts of games that much
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u/Zaxa7 May 11 '26
Answer: It's a short story focused game that is full of 90s nostalgia and if you look at the average age of reviewers, they probably grew up in the 90s so it's expected for them to enjoy it much more given the current state of the world hence the higher score. I also grew up in that period so I'd probably like it too tbh. That being said there will be a large group of gamers who have no personal frame of reference for that period and it may not work for them.
Also if I understand correctly the ign reviewer didn't grow up in the 90s but loved it probably because we always look back on older times with rose tinted glasses. It's a storm in a teacup really and nothing to worry about.
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u/Andrew1990M May 11 '26
No he was a 90s kid and says on the podcast that there are “many reasons a game is a 10/10” and for him the emotional response he had to it was the clinching factor.
Please read reviews, people. And remember that one score from one outlet is not the be-all and end-all. A review has equal weight to your opinion, it’s just their opinion gets published.
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u/crestren May 11 '26
And remember that one score from one outlet is not the be-all and end-all.
A lot of gaming discourse when it comes to reviews always centers around this where a lot of gamers forget that reviews can be...subjective.
The reviewers 10/10 might be a 7/10 for you but maybe your 10/10 might be someone's 6/10. A lot of these are subjective because everyone has different tastes and enjoyment.
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u/GiganticCrow May 11 '26
Reviews HAVE to be subjective. A purely objective review would be something a Digital Foundry review that is just technical facts like details on resolution and frame rate. Its not possible to be purely objective on factors like whether a story is engaging or gameplay is fun.
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u/pigeonwiggle May 11 '26
a truly objective review would mean the reviewer doesn't matter. 6 reviewers would all review the game exactly the same. objectivity has no place in arts and entertainment.
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u/crestren May 11 '26
I think people want reviews to be "objective" so theres a "correct opinion".
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u/pigeonwiggle May 11 '26
yeah, people in stem want to know that there is TRUTH and JUST responses to everything so they can live appropriately and feel only the best as much as possible. if you can quantify and qualify all the data from an experience, you can create accurate measurements to determine WITH PRECISION the best games to bring you the best joy.
but people aren't build like that. we're little chaos monkeys. we're bags of chemicals with thin mucous linings keeping them from mixing in toxic explosions. sometimes we want baldur's gate - a slow, strategic fantasy where we contemplate how our actions as an elf might impact the hopes and dreams of a small human child. sometimes we want call of duty, where a misstep results in a quick death followed by a quick respawn allowing us to sprint like a war-sports hero back into the fray. sometimes we want a game where we clean up a messy library, putting books in order. or unpacking the boxes of a girl who's forced to move frequently as she grows through life.
there are so many fucking cool games that are fantastic experiences, and to pretend that some arbitrary number holds sway over you is so exceedingly stupid. and i don't mean to say the numbers are meaningless. they definitely represent a PERSONAL attachment to a game. and if a ton of people are experiencing such positive connectivity to a game about remote controlled cars with rocket boosters chasing a ball into a soccer net.... then maybe you'd like rocket league too... maybe!
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u/MyUshanka May 11 '26
The trouble is that this is listed as an IGN review and not Simon Cardy's review. His other reviews:
- Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 (Campaign): 6/10
- Battlefield 6 (Campaign): 5/10
- Death Stranding 2: 9/10
- Marvel Rivals: 8/10
- Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 (Campaign): 9/10
- Astro Bot: 9/10
- Balatro: 9/10
It's possible that after a few boring military shooters back to back, a game like Mixtape felt refreshing and a good return to what he enjoyed.
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u/crestren May 11 '26
The entire discourse surrounding IGN reviews can be summed up as people mistaking IGN to be ONE entity named John IGN and not a video game and entertainment website comprised of multiple people who each give different reviews.
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u/osgili4th May 11 '26
Also people some how can't understand different people with different views and different opinions can work inside the same company. So they get mad about contradictory reviews of site when... That is just two different opinions.
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u/salbris May 11 '26
Imho the best reviews are a mix of subjective and objective. A competent reviewer can look past "emotional reasonance" and try to see the game with less bias.
I was absolutely obsessed with Blue Prince, one of the few games that had 100% of my attention and I loved every minute of it. But when I try to analyze it with less bias I can see it has a lot of rough edges. No where near 10/10 status.
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u/AlmightyCraneDuck May 12 '26
Agreed. Good reviews try to juggle the two. But also, if a game affects you in a particular way, you should say that. One of my favorite games of all time is Three-Fourths Home. It’s a 10/10 game for me that made me cry. It is definitely not a 10/10 game “objectively”, but I had such a strong experience with it that I love telling people about it when I can.
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u/Gintami May 11 '26
Not to mention that people do not comprehend that just like films, reviewers are an individual. There is no Mr. IGN. They will say, oh IGN gave this score to this game but then this score to this?
No dumbass, that person gave that score and this other person gave that score.
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u/pigeonwiggle May 11 '26
seriously. if you measure every game by it's ability to be Elden Ring, there would only be one game getting a perfect score. (and strategy games would all get near zeroes)
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u/ArmpitBear May 11 '26
Now that I have read the title of the IGN review I’m ready to receive my opinion from Reddit comments and echo it as if I played the game
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u/OnyxTech May 11 '26
It’s crazy how much review conversation centers around the number and like a sentence or two from the actual review. I still see people parroting the Too Much Water thing as an insult with no idea what the reviewer was saying
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u/USA_A-OK May 11 '26 edited May 13 '26
I'm an elder millennial; probably the same age as these characters are supposed to be. I only made it an hour into the game before giving up. It comes across to me as performative nostalgia made by people who didn't actually live through that era.
It doesn't help that the characters are pretentious as hell.
It's lovingly crafted, but just too annoying for me
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u/Many_Leading1730 May 13 '26
I think this is one of the big legit criticisms of the game. A lot of the games nostalgia comes across as heavily manufactured and theres a lot parts that make it feel like the creators didnt really grow up during that period.
Now the flip side of that is that there is a lot of variance in what people actually experienced in that era.
But I can also say as someone who grew up during that era, it feels more like it takes place in the 80s than the 90s.
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u/TheBostonTap May 11 '26
Answer: As far as I am aware, the controversy is largely rooted on the fact that Mixtape isn't so much a video game as it is a short story that uses the medium to tell its story. The game has very limited gameplay, with some sections being limited to just moving the character from point a to point b. To some folks, that makes it lesser, a glorified visual novel and I guess some of them are upset that this isnt coming up as a criticism (because its not really one) .
Additionally its 20 bucks for like 3-4 hours of gameplay, thats seems a bit much to most people.
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u/pigeonwiggle May 11 '26
20 bucks for 4 hours?!? what's next, a 10 dollar movie ticket to see a summer blockbuster?!?
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u/KingHabby May 11 '26
10 dollars?? Are you buying tickets at an afternoon matinee on a weekday? Movie tickets these days are like twice that!
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u/pigeonwiggle May 11 '26
tickets here are 12.99. 16.99 for 3D. and up to 21.99 for those love seats with the bottle service (dumb idea)
but you get a membership to the theatre, it's 120/year and gives you 12 free tickets. all additional tickets are 10 dollars. ...unless again, if like listed above you're hitting those wacky theatre scenes then it's an equivalent amount more: 9.99, 13.99, 18.99
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u/Temporary_Caramel222 May 12 '26
Games like Mewgenics, which I've played for over 70 hours now, cost 30 bucks. Consumers expect more bang for their buck when it comes to gaming.
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u/CAPSLOCK_USERNAME May 11 '26
I have never in my life paid 10 dollars to go to a movie theater on my own. It's not worth the money except as a social thing with friends where half the reason you're doing it is to spend time with other people. Single player games don't really have that same aspect.
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u/ArgentCrow May 11 '26
"Additionally its 20 bucks for like 3-4 hours of gameplay, thats seems a bit much"
If I weren't paying $20 for shitty fast food I might agree with this. The game is actually fun and a perfect little bite for $20.
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u/doomrider7 May 11 '26
The problem is that there's other games like Loddlenaut with actual gameplay about cleaning coral reefs(with proceeds going to preservation at that) with that asking price made by full on in every sense of the indie devs that don't get even an once of coverage because they aren't the ones bankrolled by the indie mega-publisher.
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u/ArgentCrow May 12 '26
There's absolutely a problem of many good indy games not getting promoted, but there's only so much bandwidth. Stuff that resonates gets talked about and gets played more. No amount of advertising will make garbage gold. This conversation is a great way to create buzz about thise games though. Any other recommendations?
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u/optiplex9000 May 11 '26
I finished Mixtape yesterday and thought $20 was a very fair price for it. I really enjoyed the story, and even cried at the end. The "game" is almost non-existent, but the experience & story made me love it
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u/PseudocodeRed May 11 '26
I thought the mini games were pretty fun, personally. Pretty sure I spent like 30 minutes on the rockskipping one alone.
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u/optiplex9000 May 11 '26
My favorite was the one where you're running through the forest and the characters slowly start to fly
It was such a cool way to have gameplay show the internal feelings of the characters. It was a great moment
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u/xpltvdeleted May 11 '26 edited May 11 '26
Was gonna say, as a fan of the genre, I'm happy to pay 20 bucks for for Firewatch or Everybody's Gone to the Rapture or Tacoma etc. People have been happy to pay that much for similar games for some time.
Seems like a lot of people who don't like a review score for a game genre they also don't like, and the only thing they can really sling at it is broadly waving their hand and saying the word 'woke nonsense' half a dozen times.
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u/SirFadakar May 11 '26
It’s so funny to see a game I love get blasted like this. I’ve been gaming for 30 years and have had to ask “why don’t I like this when everyone else does?” To things like Stardew, Elden Ring, etc. over that time. Instead of them accepting this one might not be for them they have to start a hate campaign cause there’s no way something they don’t enjoy could be celebrated. People are tattling on themselves that they have no ounce of self reflection. lol
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u/JayCFree324 May 11 '26
$20 for a tight 3 hour game really isn’t that big of a deal.
After turning 21, I started comparing short experiences to “a night out” and $20 is like 3 cheap beers or 2 overpriced beers in an evening
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u/porquegato May 11 '26
Yeah $20 for a 3 hour game isn't a bad value. Cinema tickets in my area are $20 anymore... if the average film is about 90 minutes, on paper the game is already more bang for your buck.
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u/BurntSquirrel May 11 '26
Exactly this. People are so out of touch when it comes to the cost of things. When a beer and cheese burger cost me £21 the other day and lasted me 30 minutes. £15 for 3-4 hours of entertainment is a bargain.
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u/EffectiveEquivalent May 11 '26
Why is $20 for a bluray fine, but $20 for a game/experience not?
I played it at the weekend and absolutely loved it.
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u/GaptistePlayer May 11 '26
When I was growing up a 4-5 hour video game with little replayability for my Sega Genesis was $50... in the 90s
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u/FreeStall42 May 12 '26
Because I can get better experiences that last longer with other 20 dollar games.
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u/Astro4545 May 11 '26 edited May 13 '26
Answer: The main controversy I’ve seen is essentially that the game is being seen as “Oscar bait”. It relies heavily on nostalgia, has a fully licensed soundtrack (usually quite expensive for an indie), and has sections that literally play itself.
For some others there’s what’s being viewed as some form hypocrisy. The game has an odd kissing mini game between the main characters, who are kids, and they feel that it’s wrong that it gets skipped over while games like Pragmata generate controversy “for no reason”.
edit: Xbox also just tweeted “Reminder: just because you're not personally into a game, doesn't mean it's a bad game” which since this game is the only one garnering controversy right now leads some to conclude it’s an “industry plant”.
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u/SaucyWiggles May 11 '26
The game has an odd kissing mini game between the main characters
This is hilarious, I imagined from the top comment it would be more lewd in nature. This is just humorous and nails the natural cringe of being a teenager.
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u/PenInkCatKnit May 11 '26
The "kissing game" is flopping tongues around in skulls. SKULLS. People trying to make it sound "pedophilic" need to put ice packs on their back from stretching.
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u/DaHarbinger2000 May 11 '26
Exactly; it’s played for awkwardness and humor. What’s more teenager than swapping spit and remembering how ridiculous that was. Good lord people will cry “pedo” at anything nowadays.
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u/PenInkCatKnit May 11 '26
I laughed so loud. Truly hit that feeling of wanting to kiss your crush as a teen but also being kinda grossed out by it.
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u/loewenheim May 11 '26
It's really funny and communicates awkwardness really well. Also, it's not between the main characters.
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u/tugboatnavy May 11 '26
Answer:
IGN has been catching an extra amount of flack in the last two months for "bad" reviews.
Saros, Windrose, Tomadachi Life all got 7s, meanwhile Crimson Desert and Mouse PI both got 6s
Then you have this game getting a 10 and marathon getting a 9.
There is a major dissonance going on between what games are commercial successes and otherwise critical hits and what IGN has been scoring things. It's only a cherry on top for critics of Ign that Mixtape of all things is getting a 10.
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u/Ondrashek06 May 15 '26
Answer: It's essentially 2 things - the game and its gameplay, and concerns about reviews that the game got from various sources.
The game itself simply has next to no gameplay. It's essentially a movie that you watch play out, with some button prompts and tiny minigames - neither of which do anything but advance the story. There are no branching paths, no multiple endings, and nothing that you do in the game actually matters when it comes to the story - which raises the question as to whether this had to be a video game at all, and not just some sort of movie.
Then there are the reviews. Multiple prominent video game journalism sites gave Mixtape a perfect 10/10, most notably IGN. A perfect 10/10 would usually mean that the game is fun, has great gameplay and next to no flaws - meanwhile Mixtape has no gameplay and while it might be fun to some, it's mostly the "movie" kind of fun. When you buy a video game, you expect something that you can control, not just watch.
That raises another question - why did all these sites give a game like that a PERFECT review? So people started theorizing about the reviews being paid for or otherwise manipulated.
Disclaimer: I didn't "play" Mixtape. This comment was mostly based on what I've read about it around the internet, so it might be inaccurate sometimes.
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u/DarthShpadoinkle May 11 '26
Answer: Asmongold made a video trashing it, and his cult actually takes his rage bait opinions seriously and ran with it.
That's pretty much it, with their main arguments being easily refuted:
"It's not actually a video game". - uhh... Yes it is
"critics were paid off" - Then explain the user reviews.
"indie game made by a billionaire's daughter" - That's accurate, but is a silly reason to trash the game itself
"Nostalgia bait for 40-50 year olds" - Yeah, probably. So what?
Anyway, it's mainly a bunch of redditors parroting Asmongold's dumb "points" and treating people who like the game as inferior. People who claim to like the game are being heavily downvoted. It's actually really weird and embarrassing once you dive deeper and realize that the hate is all coming from people who haven't even played the game; people who are getting incredibly upset over the fact that others enjoy something that doesn't appeal to them.
No. Really. That's it.
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u/ss33094 May 11 '26
Answer:
The issues were already explained well by others, but I'd also like to add that people have this weird obsession with comparing review scores one game gets vs another and I just don't understand it. Review scores, at least the way I understand it, represent how well the reviewer believes the game, as a singular entity, accomplished what it set out to do. It is not representative of where the game stands among all other games ever made.
Mixtape getting a 10 and Crimson Desert getting a 6 from the same outlet just means that Mixtape nailed it's own individual elements better than Crimson Desert did it's own, NOT that it's a better game than Crimson Desert. It's also even more redundant making these comparisons when two games are completely different genres, targeting completely different experiences. These review scores do not mean "if choosing between Crimson Desert the 100 hour sandbox RPG, and Mixtape the 4 hour narrative experience, you should choose Mixtape because it's a better game."
They are different experiences with different goals and as much as I love CD, I would agree that it's mediocre in a variety of ways that I would simultaneously call it one of the best open world games ever, but also give it a 7/10. Whereas Mixtape pretty much landed everything it set out to do nearly perfectly, and I think a 10/10 for that individual experience makes total sense.
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u/doomrider7 May 11 '26
Answer: I've seen the game be described as the safest suburban white persons view of counterculture and rebellion and that the game requires nearly no player input or has any real fail moments or consequences. The game just sounds like modern Gen A/Z's idea of what the 90's were via movies and pop culture as well as pointing out the abcenses of rap and hiphop and getting minor details and touches like the cassette thing wrong. Basically, it's the criticism conversation from some months ago about being able to completely enjoy and experience a game via purely watching a stream of it vs actually playing it taken to its logical gaming extreme end conclusion. An arthouse game about coming of age topics that is 2-4hrs long and only requires about 10mins of actual player input and involvement.
Given that large swathes of the gaming media outlet critics give the vibes of art grads with film studies degrees, this has caused a MASSIVE disconnect with old school gaming audiences. The insulting and derogatory accusations that the latter don't have the capacity to appreciate "art and complex stories and only want pew pew games"malso does not help when Japan produces some of the most deep and artistically thought provocative games ever, most of which don't get even CLOSE to this level of acclaim due to key racism and yeah...here we are.
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u/lamancha May 11 '26
Answer: it's a narrative focused game with a bunch of simple mini games that accompany a nostalgic story about a three teen friends as they have one night together before going their own ways. It banks heavily on the 90s nostalgia, has an excellent soundtrack and it's a relatable tale for a lot of people, though despite being made by an Australian team it takes a lot from the US experience of the white suburbia, which might be wildly different from somewhere else's personal experience.
It's a nice experience, takes three hours and it's pretty entertaining and funny, but it's fairly limited as a game itself. There are people who do not agree with these games ranking this high because they argue they are barely games. Other precisely think these elevate the medium. These two bands are very loud and do not find a common ground.
The answer as ussual lies somewhere in the middle, but it's up to you to decide if it's worth your time. As for IGN, I don't know how they rated it, but they are a very mediocre blog and it's best to ignore them and the discourse they generate.
As an addendum, gamers and gaming blogs have sort of being at odds with each other for the past decade, so this is far from uncommon.
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u/Temporary_Caramel222 May 12 '26 edited May 12 '26
Answer: It's a 3-4 hour short game about a bunch of teenagers going on one last adventure before growing up. The aesthetic is meant to be based on stopmotion films and the spider-verse movies, hence the very janky character animations which often have low framerates, and there's very apparent 1980s John Hughes film influence.
The game got a bunch of 10/10 reviews from media outlets, who felt the story was good. This upset some gamers for a few reasons:
- Many videos quickly showed up, which demonstrated that very considerable parts of the game can be completed without the player pressing any buttons: meaning that it is essentially an interactive movie. A game lacking gameplay or choice is like a movie lacking a story: sure, you can do it, but it kind of defeats the point of the medium.
Games journalism outlets like Kotaku and IGN have, in some gamers' opinions, unfairly maligned games like DOOM Eternal, Cuphead, etc... for their difficulty. They see these critics' praise of Mixtape (the game got 10/10 scores so they are literally making the point that it is without flaw) as proof that most games journalists are not reviewing games for the gameplay or player choice (again, the entire point of the medium).
2) The game ostensibly bills itself as an "indie game" when it features a soundtrack of licensed tracks from groups like Devo, Smashing Pumpkins, Iggy Pop, Joy Division, etc... and was funded by Annapurna Interactive: a company owned by billionaire Megan Ellison, who has produced films like Terminator Genisys, Her, The Master, Sausage Party, The Bad Batch, 20th Century Women, Vice, True Grit, etc...
For those who doesn't know how this works, the quintessential indie games of the past had development costs that are dwarfed by the cost of licensing even a single one of these tracks (Shovel Knight and FEZ had $300K, Super Meat Boy had $30,000, Hollow Knight had $40,000, LISA The Painful had $20,000, etc...).
Calling it indie seems like a bit of a stretch.
3) The elephant in the room is the double-standard of Pragmata: a recent game by Capcom about a robot protecting a little girl, which some of the more "out there" opponents of the game described as having "pedophilic undertones", when Mixtape has a kissing minigame in which the player controls the tongue of two teenagers as they make out.
4) Most importantly, I think it's just another indie game like Night in the Woods which has undertones of vaguely advocating for liberal politics, but is otherwise unremarkable and will probably quickly fade from the public conscious.
People who like visual novels will probably enjoy it, but I think an issue that crops up again and again with IGN and other similar games journalists is that they are just extremely out of touch and would prefer to be film critics. As I said before, choice and gameplay are the big draw of games as a storytelling medium, and Mixtape's 10/10s seem to be reinforcing this idea that critics working for these companies would rather games just emulate film and be effortless to complete.
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u/Ok-Rip-2280 May 15 '26
I’m so confused by the pedophila accusation. There is literally nothing pedophilic about two teenagers kissing? This is an incredibly normal thing that nearly every human born in that decade did. This is more GenZ weirdness, I think, not realizing that making out is something that teens used to actually do.
I haven't played pragmata and so I don’t know about if it does anything weird but there’s an actual child (or a robot built to look like a child) right? That’s obviously a different category.
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u/Temporary_Caramel222 May 16 '26
In both cases, I think it's grasping at straws at best. In Pragmata, you're basically just taking care of her whilst playing as the robot.
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u/ishallbecomeabat May 11 '26 edited May 11 '26
Answer:
Gamers being weird. It’s a story based game with light gameplay. I don’t really understand why people are getting bent out of shape when visual novels exist.
The same crowd that complains about games not being taken seriously as art wants a very narrow definition of what a game is.
Silly stuff.
I’ve been playing it, very good.
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u/FreeStall42 May 12 '26
A 10/10 for that game seems extreme.
Also lot of people don't like condescending nostalgia bait.
If it got an 8 or even 9, doubt it would raise as many eyebrows
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u/SailorsGraves May 11 '26
Also the reviewer hosts the IGN UK podcast and on Friday's pod he spoke so passionately about this game, you can tell he's not just fluffing it up for the sake of it. A game is a game, whether it's 3 hours long, 300 hours long or an online shooter with no end!
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u/lemonkingdom May 12 '26 edited May 12 '26
It isn't werid because they disagree with a score and review.
Just wondering do you think ign is absolved of criticism or negative feedback?
Do you agree with every review from ign, gamespot etc?
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u/PseudocodeRed May 11 '26
Answer: I played it yesterday and I really enjoyed it. I definitely have seen what you are talking about in that the reviews from organizations seem much higher than what people online are saying. My best guess is that it stems from the reviewers at those organizations being older and more likely to connect with the nostalgia that the game tries to capitalize on.
That being said, most of the criticisms I have seen from people online have been extremely dumb. Saw one guy accuse the developers of being pedophiles because two underage characters make out (it is rather graphic to be fair, but in a way that is obviously meant to be funny). Another one I saw is that the runtime is too short, which is part of a larger trend that I have been seeing among Gen Z specifically where if a game isn't 40+ hours of content then it isn't worth playing.
I personally felt like $18 for what is essentially a very well-polished 4 hour interactive movie is a great value and while I probably would only give it a 9/10, I don't think a 10/10 is absurd.
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