Frankly, it doesn’t matter if I’ve played it or not – the issues brought into play (ha!) are not unique to Rage, and apply to whole cartload of other games too. I’m just grabbing a muse and running with it, wrongly.

I remember when Rage was announced. It was very iD. Technical breakthroughs, innovations and pipelines that caress a hurting artist and make his/her life easier with megatextures and whatnot. Easier to build and paint massive, detailed and gorgeous worlds. That’s very, very important, in fact – if the toolchain bogs artists down, it bogs down the content. Period. It’s bloody hard to get the vision across and delivered if the tools hold you back, so it easily brings up the easy choice of cutting down on vision instead and keeping the coders busy on features instead of tools. Very valid from business perspective in a culture where the management walks down the hallways holding a shotgun in hand, in case of obstructive requests threatening the top-down task delegation and direct profit potential on screens.

It’s very linear game, that, played from a single person perspective. It has all the necessary savepoints and map levels laid out in advance. Open world it ain’t, not in most cases — few examples exist, and they’ve nailed it down. Valve and Thatgamecompany come to mind on top of their own game, doing their own thing by daring to fail internally when trying and pushing ideas across. No, I have no idea what the studio culture and working ways are at iD, but keep in mind I’m not talking about Rage or iD solely. This is widespread, so I’m happily generalizing and blaming everyone equally. Generally speaking.

Back to Rage. Yes. The review gives it the respect and merit for how much of an visual experience it is. Then comes the bad news that don’t surprise anyone anymore, except by their directness and frankness. We need painful and uncomfortable feedback like this, in the industry where every review is suspect to suspicion over advertisement dollars shining through on the same review site. We must be held accountable as well, not just reviewers.

Elsewhere, someone described how inviting and lush the world in Rage looks, how it looks like a living and breathing thing. From afar, I think he added. Invites to get closer and immerse oneself into the world, he continued. Haven’t heard more from him.

Yes, well. It certainly does have just about perfectly executed art direction and fistful of hard-ass visual styles reminding us of Mad Max and Fallouts and other favourites.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m an artist and thrive for graphical quality, but for the sake of all things dear and holy to the audience, it has to have the function and the reason. It must be the effect after a cause.

When I look at the world of Rage from graphical standpoint, yes, it’s bloody pretty. It runs at constant 60 frames per second on the 360 and flows like molten butter. Carmack is insane. Now here’s the kicker for me: I’d love to think of a world like that as the canvas for everything that really makes the world breathe. Canvas where the final color comes from creatures inhabiting it, each tangled in the sprawling storyline and cross-connections and interactions driving events and agreements and disagreements and love and war. Stuff you could potentially write a book about after playing through and running into plot twists and characters that develop, while the game engine churns out richly detailed lushness at natural flow to support the depth. Something to sink into.

At this point I should be following some rules of writing and offering clever counterpoints and fresh ideas to rectify stuff I present as issues. Yes, well..

… I draw blank, sorry.

I do have a thought about reviews and their relationship with the industry, though.

Reviews hold a power to potentially echo back into development of future titles, all the way to the initial business level when the project proposal is under scrutiny and compared to similar predecessors. If they’re skewed, it all rolls slowly down backwards.

I fear that in the future game projects include a sub-plan entitled “reviews” under master marketing plan, where key high-volume reviews are designed to highlight the game features that are most cost-effective to implement, made to match and support those tailored reviews. All laid out in advance, calculated and monetized. Games become graphical technological featurepiles that need to be separately gamified. Is that where the mainstream high-dollar triple-a industry is headed? Gamification is already a standard term, driving investors into tears of joy and older developers into tears of rage. Sorry, I meant discomfort. Monetization is also an already established keyword in game development. They’re mostly coming up when pitching games to investors, and I understand the need for common language of $$ especially when investors are coming from outside the industry, but when they really do sneak their way up into game designs themselves, it becomes a bit creepy for many.

We love doing games for all the potential they hold as we see them blossom and grow on our screens during development, not what they often end up as. After a project is done, it’s usually remembered as a series of war stories over a pint of beer. I’m sure artists, animators, coders, sound designers and leads at iD loved to see their vision shine, and they certainly deserve all the possible credit for their work. It sure is beautiful. I just worry about what gets left behind.

I mean to say, ahem, damn. Yes. This is how narrative and being-there experience and involvement and all the other once-vapour golden ideas will be done. By recognizing the need for them, and then shoveling resources at them like it was nobody elses business, because it’s not impossible unless you keep blindly listening to grey-faced suits who project future core targets based on what has sold in the past five years. Don’t look there. Future ain’t in the past, unless you take into account other mediums and forms of storytelling. Like, I don’t know, books or television series with people in them. Possibly interacting with each other. Ok, that was slightly on the trolling side but how else can it be said?

I’ve often heard how a properly done AI companion could feel like a buddy on coop-mode at your side. Watching the AI / NPC gameplay video, that goes right down the drain. Know why? Your buddy is never present.

Let me open that one.
When your best mate evar is playing alongside with you, you see only his actions and the resulting effects. Solved puzzles, blown guard towers, whatnot. What the videogame and the mission requires. However, when you turn to look at the guy or the gal you’ve spent your childhood with, falling in sync from trees and hitting the curb face first while barreling downhill with crap bicycles, you don’t see him/her. Just a badly animated videogame character that slides around and repeats the videogame motions.
No visual connection or context to tie with, nor personality shining through. Your bud can do just what the player character is limited to do, and that’s always in minority compared to AI characters who need to connect with at least the context of the story and dialogue when interacting with the player. Player model, who incidentally, stands proud and motionless like a big tree, deferred light glimmering in his normalmaps.
Point being, you can’t properly connect with a stiff slidey videogame construct that has less naturality to its movements than an average kitchen appliance.

Your NPC buddy AI companion thing is not limited, though. As in the gameplay video, he/she can project very human traits — constructed, of course, but if they’re triggered by the surroundings and situation, they can become human. They become something player can relate with. Almost human reactions, if you may. If there’s an underlying structure and balance between predictability and unpredictability, they start to give off a whiff of a personality behind the actions.

Of course, there are logistics underneath. Building personality through animation, context sensitivity, AI, sound design, dialogue and all the other cogwheels of the machine is a massive task and there’s no sense nor chance to populate whole game world with such characters. It’d be awfully nice, of course, but then designers and writers would break their heads trying to make the key characters stand out. The mass and weight of it just needs to be recognized and placed accordingly in the game, to have it impact the world and story.

In regular co-op, as fun and blast it may be, your best bud fighting alongside you isn’t going to humor you by sticking his head into a barrel and testing the echo for the fun of it. That’s not acting out in a world together. It’s more akin to perhaps scooting radiocontrolled cars around a track together. Bloody good fun, yes, but try and stick that into a narrative context and something’s gonna be missing, unless just watching events unfold from synchronized actions counts. Sometimes it does, but even then it has to be done from the get go with that in mind without shooting for what can’t be done. Recognizing the means, etc.

Of course, getting back to the gameplay video, nothing’s done right until it’s in the hands of everyone and receiving actual love and tears. So far there’s only a glimpse of gameplay video, and cynicism is easy. I for one try and be optimistic about this, as I take this bloody personally. Now, that camera and some of the strained sort of animation.. Ah, can’t have everything in one go, can I?

You see, we flock to Twitter to have followers. We dive into Facebook not exactly only to be in regular contact with friends – all 1500 of them – but to enforce them to follow us on our daily adventures. Myspace I won’t mention as it’s completely passé and therefore bad form these days.

Mundane mishap with bacon becomes an adventure for others to reflect upon when it’s written in an appropriately cynical and/or hurt and/or humorous manner. We thrive to be recognized and noticed, and by gods, if someone retweets our daily adventure further down the social pathways, we are accepted en masse, and what could be better than that? Have Justin Bieber answer “<3″ to you?

We post photos to Flickr not solely to catalogue them to ourselves, but to receive attention from likeminded strangers. Oh, we just want some love. DeviantArt I’m not even going to talk about.

After indulging in this outright whor- ..selfpromotion that’s quickly replacing the oldfashioned mirrors at home, we settle down on our always socially acceptable Ikea Klippan and grab the latest socially approved game console controller in our hands, or stand around waving hands as per the new trend. We engorge ourselves with arbitrary puzzles, ultraviolent birds or outright mass slaughter, whatever happens to reflect our current needs of latest trend.

Now, one of two things may or may not happen.

For the first option let’s assume we play a game, controlling a character we of course project our needs into, being psychologically weak bags of meat. Our surrogate waddles around the designated game world, doing whatever darkly deeds we make him do within the set limitations. Now, again, in this one thing, one or two further things result. Projecting his daily self (or his need to act like complete opposite of his daily self) into virtual adventureland, our gamer avatar creates a massive mishap and more often than not the surrounding random NPC’s do not reflect on it. Nobody comments “haha lol didnt know you could do that with bacon! is awesome”.

Experience feels detached, unless it feels to the player just like it does in Facebook and Twitter where nobody comments on your antics either, in which case it really is just very sad. Then, if they do react, it’s most likely one spoken line randomized out of list of three after which they fall back into their walkcycles oblivious to the event that should have changed their depicted virtual lives.

Come to think of it, how closely that also matches Your Daily Facebook Experience is just downright creepy.

That’s it. World goes on inside the very tubely shaped game, indifferent as ever, because the characters don’t have to guide you forward – merely provide some mood filler, provide the backstory piece by piece and preparing player for the next level in a subtle, non-intrusive manner.

“Oh, didn’t know bacon could do that. By the way, stranger with a nice face I place my trust upon, did you hear the uberkapitan of our oppressive alien enemy forces has been seen three blocks ahead of you, just now? Can’t imagine anyone would take the opportunity, really, these days. Won’t they think of the future of our children. Goodbye!”

Of course, it doesn’t matter if our player listened to the dead-eyed monologue of future events or not, since he’ll invariably end up three blocks that way anyways, and will end up shooting things until things go away in various fashions. End result is the same. Both ways, our player might feel a bit cheated and dirty for being treated cheaply. Also, the bleak pointlessness of heard-it-already monologues is the reason they get always skipped. They don’t really add anything for most players.

Second option is we get a permission to wander off the plot path into the wild blue yonder of sandbox, a prospect that terrifies the already shambled minds of story- and game designers.

In there, player actually relies on feedback to be kept on the plot pipeline, fending off the dreaded situation where player gets lost, out of sight of any story engine characters and plot points. Of course, rarely such possibility is allowed to happen – you are essentially kept on a steeply inclined surface with nowhere to go but in the generally correct direction.

In here, mishap with a bacon gets commented upon as you need to be coerced into deeper interaction with NPC’s in order to figure out your way. Of course, the bacon that caused your wildest mishap ever was most likely an important macguffin in which case all apparent freedom is just a logical series of traps to lure you forward. All very elaborately designed set pieces one after another to produce an invisible tube you hopefully run through, either straight and ignoring the outside world or zigzagging around to enjoy the inessential.

If a sandbox game world had no lures and traps and big pointing arrows, player would eventually slumber to stop, bored with nothing to do – just like in his real world, except devoid of social networking sites. THAT crap does not sell.

But I’m not really writing about any of that stuff.

What player loves to find in the game world is some sort of recognition and results from his actions. Only a few games have done a longterm cause and effect stuff for the insanely horrible convoluted mess they are to create. You know, stuff like burning a village down making you a bad guy in those parts AND forcing the locals into bitterer and poorer bunch of bastards, planting a tree and coming back in few years gametime to see it has grown, awwhowniceandcute, et cetera.

Of course, those games suffered from other anecdotal mishaps which took over the whole public view and ended up defining the games. Devs just couldn’t put the brakes on after figuring out a nice world to live in, and instead ended up with extra buggery people loved to laugh about.

What happened was social networks, viral, sharing funny screenshots and agreeing with critics to become a popular dude, you know. People happened. It’s why we can’t have anything nice.

Anyways, think about it. What’s important in my mind is that games should retain a tangible relationship with you through your actions. The world you return to after your TwatterFissbookSpace journeys have to feel familiar, with your own proverbial shoeprints all over. I say return to with italics to make a certain point. We return to home. We return to familiarity. We stick to our old shoes because they’re comfortable and they smell only because they’re full of ourself, as horrible as that sounds. We’re on buddy terms with the grime we leave behind. If the game feels like you have left your fingerprints all over, banged the nice old villagers daughter and got even his dog a lasting drug addiction, you’re immersed because shit has just got personal through involvement.

Maybe, one day on your neverending journeys, you return to the same village which you have forgot about in your 15 in-game years of exile and come across a bastard teenage boy NPC with certainly very familiar facial features. Oh, hello, world just dropped you a kiddo bomb and you can take it as a sidekick.

If real life can stab you with a loving knife when you’re not expecting, why shouldn’t game world?

Even better,your character starts an unstoppable aging process from that point on to bring out another “oh okay, let’s watch this one out” trap for the player to keep playing those extra 35 hours.

Then he dies next to his son, in whichever timely manner an old hero would die in.

Game ticks on without falling back to “End Unlocked! Here’s A Badge! New Game? Y/N” trope.  Slowly realize your thumb twitch on the controller jolted the old mans’ son who, by now, after accumulating experience with his battlehardened father, is now a formidable character of his own. Sense of involvement through heritage, hoo boy.

It all pans out quite smoothly as a concept. If there’s NPC party involved, you’re the logical next leader again and game flows on without breaking a sweat or beat. If NPC party disagrees, enter the short skirmish among buddies as a player tutorial to your new character skills.

Sure, it’s nigh impossible to create, but I can bloody well dream while running in my tubes shooting things that look different. Maybe next gen allows us to create stuff not as limited by hardware. Maybe next generation of publishers allows us to create stuff not as limited by quarterly fiscals.

On a sidenote, we’re still calling current gen next gen. What’s up with that? Why isn’t there anyone trol-.. prepping us for new stuff already?

“Oh hi, nice blog post, didn’t know you can write. By the way, stranger with a nice face I place my trust upon, did you hear your gaming hardware is well out of warranty and oh right did you hear there is this really cool video leaked where a character in a popular television show is playing a game that looks amazing and it’s something very nextnext gen looking and everyone’s talking about it online..”

We’ll know it’s coming when we scramble to share it to our massive entourage of people who knows us by our links only.

Meanwhile, have a look at none other than Salman Rushdie checking out in-game storytelling where you can deviate from plot path whenever you like.

A very descriptive quote. It creates vague notions of how it might have happened, what did happen and leaves us curious, and shocked. Evoking empathy and mystery. Very standard event in entertainment industry, yet handled in so many different ways. Most of the time, it emotionally impacts us when we are passive in front of television and let it all wash over us, allowing ourselves to be smothered with scripted-to-detail flow of it.

How on earth do you communicate the emotional magnitudes of such event to a player who sits comfortable on a sofa with a piece of knobby plastic in his hands? Throw blood on screen? Meh. Five-eyed tentacle monsters the size of skyscrapers? Bah. Basic videogame tropes, and they have lost much of their impact. Only games that manage to pull a good left hook on the player are those with something new and plenty of borrowed. Dunno about blue, we really don’t have to go to color grading here.

Do you do it by player character narrative? A voice of the character you’re playing? But it doesn’t sound like you! Are you audience or player character or something in between? It’s a detachment from gameplay in itself. Basic narrative voice? Basic, works, but has to be played beforehand really really well so it won’t become one of those annoying gameplay breaks. You know them, I know you do. Most of the time we get to see a fancy CG clip with near-Hollywood production values. How does that work, then?

“Ah damn you, stupid cutscene,” *clickclickclick* “AND WHY CAN’T I SKIP THE DAMNED arfg meh” *foreheadslap* and off you go, distracting yourself by clicking around a random pornsite in teh intarwebs, ruining your life forever, cocaine, etc.

Developers poured sweat, blood, money, tears, long hours, lost marriages, haggard faces and years worth of therapy sessions to those cutscene / narrative break moments and what do you do? You throw a tantrum, you selfish prick. Have you no heart or sensibility to those starving and homeless? No, wait — it’s not your fault! My apologies. I should have added narrative design to the list of good sacrificial traits us developers have, but then I wouldn’t be writing yet another blogpost that stinks of a bitter lemon a very fat and unpleasant tourist has sat on for hours.

Exhibit B:

Developer conclave, the masters with tallest chairlegs, sits silent under a pendulum axe that swings nigh-on their worried brows.

Lords of their realm are not pleased with their latest offering, the majestic tour de force through worlds imagined by their masterminds, and they have summoned a wrath on their homes. A Mandatum carved in black obelisk has been tossed amids the conclave, and lest they follow it, they will be banished from their realm.

Their gods are gods of coins, and coins they need to create worlds, and worlds they need to create to summon more coins for their gods. Vicious circles surround them, and the Mandatum has words that glow red:

“Sequel must be made, and Sequel must replenish the faith of all who follows us; Sequel will set us up as lords of imagination, and this world will follow us to those we create. Sequel must have thriceworth explosions, ten sacks more guns, and in hearts, it must taste bitter and sorrowful, yet caring and full of springtime hope”

Conclave has banished the scary-speaking and shallow designers, for they were aliens to them. They have new ones, young and snappy and filled to brim with new ideas, yet new ideas worry conclave, who already shit worry-shaped bricks out beneath their lizardly tails.

“How do you, young and snappy and filled to brim with ideas designer minds, would approach this quest? How, shall we reform our words, will you fulfill this bloody Mandatum we have received from the angry skies?”

The new designers, their hats full of their head, with their heads too big for their hats, reply:

“We shall rethink teh whole thought of moving pictures, teh very soundness of it. We will bring you a new prince of emotions, of new pedigree of teh empathy itself!”

The conclave, as if made of one mind and of one body, buries its many heads in its colourless hands, and shits some new bricks.

Designers scurry amidst the trained monkeys, peering over their hairy and scrawny shoulders, asking this and that. They are like mosquitos, sucking a drop of ideas from there, another from elsewhere, and so it goes. They look at the world monkeys are creating, on deeper level than mere head-lines and key-words and idea-boards.  They see the ethereal and surreal and unreal character take his babysteps, reaching out to his buddies amidst the ravages of war, in the torn land. They are empathic creatures, and they are moved.

“Something is here. Something wicked has cometh. Be still, my heart! What is it made of?”
“It is sad. No, it is hopeful, but has not found resolution yet. It is a story in itself. How do we tell teh story with no words like teh words we are written in?”

They confer. They look back at old moving pictures, and see how moving and marvellous they are. Yet, they were not of the same world, in the end – they were of another. Detached.

How to attach them? Something new is needed. Did they not have the world already, a beautiful world that interacts with you, a world that touches you back and reacts when you shoot at it? Their eyes opened up, and they sang a song.

Hi-ho, world is not of heartless  personae-less AI-animatronics;

Hi-ho, world creates the stories it weaves it leaves for us;

The AI-animatronics teh monkeys have bred are teh answer, thus;

[chorus] Me so horny, ahunka-hunka-hunka!

Wait, did I just wander towards context-sensitive AI and world and .. oh, drat. No, forget all that for now. I won’t go there, partly because I still like to entertain the idea of presenting you dear readers with gameplay blogread breaks that possibly annoy you to no end, and if you’re a game developer, you probably deserve it anyways.

So. Cutscenes?

On my part 1 of this probably neverending quest against wrongful cross-use of different storytelling media, I was rather annoyed at how media for passive audience gets treated in media for audience that dictates action and is hardly ever passive. Did I say cutscenes are inherently bad by nature if they are in games? Hell no. They can carry the story forwards, and if they are long and interesting enough, they do turn the player around into passive audience mode. It’s just the introduction and preparation and other cunning juggling of mindgames that gets forgotten, or gets acknowledged with “.. but it’s C priority, look at the schedule and just forget it already.”

Let’s juggle with some ideas. Let’s follow that white C priority rabbit down the hole nobody ever goes.

Traditionally, as mentioned before, cutscenes get slapped in where the transition from place / gameplay event / level to another occurs. It’s introductionary clip, a thematic booster or a plot forwarding device. Nothing wrong with that! It’s external stimulus within the game, as it comes automatically and with no player interaction required. One inherent problem might lay in the natural fact that it’s made to match the game world. It looks the same, it has the same colors and same art direction, even if it has higher production values and better looks than the game itself.

Scenario 1: Marshall Blueberry Got The Twitches

Player trots down an alleyway after clearing it free of giant cockroach combatant drones. It narrows down ahead, but we can see it opens up to a T junction alley between city blocks ahead. Right as the player is about to step to that crossing alley,

something loud and yellow and black and blue screams past his eyes, blurry and totally out of this world. Viewpoint suddenly shoots away, world on screen turns into caricature comic book representation of Your Mind On Cockroach Drugs, with more angles and corners than there can logically be, with colors dancing and the cockroach recon convoy passing our players location, who now is seen curled up in fetal position. We are watching him from high up, as if in astral experience. Loud cacophony fills our ears, wild vivid colors only drugged up demo coders can come up with fill our eyes, and with a quietness that comes so fast it sounds like a bang,

everything returns normal. Black frame or two on screen, regular colors of the world fill our view, everything is 90 degrees tilted. Your character is still on the ground, and you SO did not expect that moment. Oh, right, there was some gas tossed your way during the last skirmish..

Yet, cutscene it was. Thematic, maybe – or if the convoy had some wild caricatures of doomsday machines being transported, it could have been a plot forwarder as well. With good luck, it left the player eager to move along and figure out (allowed to figure out, really) what those drugged up, psychedelic hallucinations actually meant. And most importantly, it threw the player off the safe stand, reinvigorating him. It gave him something fresh to chew. It’s a game, you can go ahead and run with scissors at hand!

It doesn’t have to be the same static looking world you live in, you bitter monkeys.

Scenario 2: TVTropes edition!

Player trots down a grey alleyway after clearing it free .. you know. The same basic premise, right? Just as our hero is about to put his foot into the alleyway, we snag the viewpoint with a reflex snap towards right, where a BLOODY HUGE MASSIVE CRAB TANK AIEE–
(cue War Bonds Are Good For You -jingle and video reminder)
Hello folks, have you been feeling downwards lately? Have you not considered – or have you considered, but never dared to try the radio-activital water enhancer? With pellets of pure uranium carefully hand-casted into cement base, you only dip our Radium-O into your water tank and it will be filled with reinvigorating, life-energy boosting ATOMS OF THE FUTURE for you to drink! Available now from Lol-Mart!
(cue War Bonds Are Good For You -jingle and video reminder. “Returning to live action now!”)
–we snag the viewpoint with a reflex snap towards right, where a BLOODY HUGE MASSIVE CRAB TANK AIEE is shooting past your eyes and oh shit that’s big, those are hardened orbital bunker buster nukes on that platform, and oh wow I’ll just wait this one out, I know I’m gonna run into these baddies again–

And so on. Player is very, very used to all kinds of media. He watches television and movies. Television more than movies. He probably has watched television more than he has played games. He bloody well grew up with it. It was his nanny when he was a toddler. We took a step out of the box only to find old familiar things in new context, but somehow, as it was all so very familiar, it didn’t annoy .. And it was part of that world! Atomic age, with gigantic cockroaches with nukes that go to orbit. Cutscene itself did not serve gameplay function, other than slip a bookmark into the players memory about what he’s done and seen before. He’ll remember that moment, and that’s depth in itself, in a world filled with cliches seen bazillion times.

So maybe it wasn’t exactly out of the box. Maybe it was more like beating and kicking the box into different shape, but it doesn’t matter. Only as long as you can see the box, tiptoe around it, have some whacks at it and generally see ways to make things that go into the box and out again, you should be fine.

- If it’s a radically different cutscene, make it radically fast change because it’s not in balance with regular gameworld.

- If it looks like the ordinary gameworld, present it in much slower fashion as it’s heavily balanced. As mentioned, unbalanced you can whack into the weirdwoods as hard as you can, and it’ll be better for it.

Scenario 3: Daily grind

Our hero is about to embark on the crossing alley, and world pauses for split second. You hear DVD whirring to life. Screen comes back alive, but from a different viewpoint. There’s a big-ass tank-like monster with chipped armour, viewed from almost ground level to emphasize the big guns and bolts and stuff covering it. Lots of shiny bits, flares, DOF tricks with camera that shakes and rattles. A tank tread rolls menacingly towards the camera, which cuts to another angle right when the heavy metal descends on it. We’re shown the full size of convoy now, from aerial perspective. Sound is muffled, a cloud drifts under the camera to further emphasize scale. It’s all very movie-looking.
Cut back to player viewpoint, with player control. If he walks now, he’ll die under the machines. So he waits, watching. Pre-scripted convoy doesn’t care about him, its only function is to hint at future developments of this world war against bloody big insects with guns.

Sound familiar? I won’t even go there anymore, lest this blog gets banned from teh intarwebs for all the cursing.

Traditionally we suffer from too much safety, stay too sheltered and make familiar decisions. Things end up too “financially sound” and “marketable” and “it’s what others do so it’s what players want”. There’s no need to make the whole game artistically different and clever and celshaded whatnot with “unique art direction” with “extravagantly brave colours”. Just include the salt that goes on top of the same goo others are cooking. Little pinch is enough to remind people of the proper flavors.

There’s so much more to be said, regarding generally descriptive moments inserted in the middle of gameplay et cetera, but this is already bordering on too long post. I do smell the part 3 coming in nearish future, possibly with the notion of fading the cutscenes transparent to the player, or something. Until then, do leave comments if you have anything to add or argue.