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Zelda-Inspired Plucky Squire Shows What Happens When A Game Doesn't Trust Its Players (kotaku.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

37 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I personally always dislike it, too.

There are two reasons you might want to do this as a dev, of course. One of them I feel kinda half-asses your design, if you don't want to get a threat or failure during gameplay to get into the way of your storypacing, just make a visual novel. Or at least something like SOMA, Amnesia or Still Wakes The Deep.
Or alternatively, if you want to make a game explicitly made for children that's okay, but then also do the marketing a bit more kid-centric IMO. I dunno, maybe this one is actually genuinely meant for children, but some of the humor and writing doesn't feel that way if I'm honest. Princess Peach does this more thoroughly: It is the same "handholding 100% of the time", but it's also very obviously meant to be played primarily by relatively small children!

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

This is less a sign of "the devs don't trust the player" and more just plain out bad game design. Maybe the game itself is very obvious (I don't know, i haven't played nor do I intend to), but this kind of thing is usually done when the game is obtuse and the developer wants a quickfix instead of actually reworking the entire thing. Then again, if your game is for little children and they can't figure out how to play it, then there's something fundamentally wrong with it and maybe you should go back to the drawing board.