Rating Curve

re: rephrased to sound less mean spirited because i cant delete my account so i might as well extrapolate on this a bit more. also put in simpler terms

• theres good postmodern art and theres bad postmodern art. there are ways to cut the lines across but a good way to tell which side youre on is how if you feel that your art was too ambiguous - so much so that you feel the need to shove the supposed 'meaning' down everyones throat so that they would able to appreciate it as a kind of extradiagetic context - it probably wasnt good and failed at its main goal.

• the main point here is that i never enjoyed SAVE AS as a work of art where the artist feels the need to tell the audience What To Think. it doesnt... really have good implications for your work. PAHC some years later followed this up with Cosmic which i felt was the immediately better execution. its self contained and sufficiently subtle, akin to some of the more effective narrative-exploration walking simulators out there. next to that SAVE AS invariably feels a bit hamfisted

• there is also a point to be made about the implications of adapting such a heavy topic to a heavily gamified context as well. if its an experience only to be watched, fine. but as an interative experience, its awful. its hard enough to be a medium demon, which means youll have to learn it, and replay it over, and over, and over, and over again. it doesnt take a genius to figure out how that could sour the experience in the end. in the same regard, it fails in the same way many interactive art has failed before: the levels of interaction required consistently contradicts with the ideal experience. in the same way this is where alot of modern gaming failed when trying to tackle topics of similar caliber. the most recent example being silent hill 2 2024's hilarious chase sequences that tries to put you into the center of Angela's trauma and ended up just downplaying it for the player. the original game, in comparison, knew to treat it with grace and actually understood things.

random simple gameplay over unrelated backgrounds. its alot less impressive when you realize how much of this can just be replicated with a texture pack or something.

a pretty compelling experiment about the importance of good looking art in the atmosphere of a level, in that the conclusion is tjt it barely matters.

whatever dude

i think the most pathetic thing about this level is how hard it tried to be taken seriously and still kind of looks and plays like complete garbage. i gotta give it credit for having some of the most memorable gameplay in the list's history though - lazy but elegant in a funny looking way

its okay, ive never really liked this style of decoration and the color pallette in here is deeply obnoxious so i have a hard time really getting myself to like this level. something about blis style is too detached from the game for me to really make a connection to it knowing gd is its medium, i think