Last weekend, I spent about two hours playing through Pneuma: Breath of Life — which is better described as a tech demo than a game, just barely avoids classification as a "walking simulator" with the inclusion of a few mechanically interesting but ultimately far-too-easy puzzles, and tries (and fails) to be deep and meaningful in an obnoxiously unoriginal way. To be fair, I feel that the game would have been entirely bearable if not for the protagonist's incessant pseudo-philosophical jabbering and generally unfunny commentary. Alas, however, I played with the speakers turned on.
This weekend, I got to the end of Neverending Nightmares, which has a great visual style and a nice soundtrack, but suffers from an insufficient density of actual, meaningful, engaging gameplay. There are some monsters to avoid and a few items to find, but most rooms hold nothing at all of interest except for the opportunity to watch the slow-moving protagonist drag his feet from one door to the next. Maybe all this emptiness was meant to build suspense and anticipation for the scary parts, but it doesn't quite do that. It just becomes boring. I'd absolutely love a game with the aesthetics of Neverending Nightmares and the gameplay mechanics of Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts, but no such thing exists as far as I know.
I sometimes consider myself to be a connoisseur of unpopular and forgotten games — those which are not quite bad, but arguably mediocre, rough around the edges and unrefined, charming in a way that the "Game of the Year" will never be, and more memorable than yet another highly-polished but necessarily generic blockbuster marketed to the widest possible audience. Although I do enjoy the more mainstream games, which have certainly earned their place at the top, I also appreciate attempts at innovation and originality even when the final product is flawed. Rather than demanding perfection in games, I simply want to see things I've never seen before.
So I guess I consider myself to be a somewhat open-minded individual when it comes to video games. I am, however, rapidly becoming less tolerant of games in which far too much time is spent simply moving from point A to point B. And don't even get me started on games which consist entirely of moving from point A to point B. It's not original; no boundaries are being shattered; it's not 2007 anymore and you're not Jason Rohrer creating Passage. So stop it.
Don't get me wrong; I love what independent developers have done for the game industry, in general. But at some point, developers and consumers of independent games began to believe not only that video games can/should/must be "art" (an opinion with which I do not wholly disagree) but also that video games can/should/must become "art" by being less interactive (which, I think, is ridiculous). The deliberate abandonment of challenge and consequent loss of any engaging gameplay, in favor of light "exploration" (too often of a mostly linear path) and passive "experience" (of moving through the virtual environment of an interactive story), has become far too normal in indie "game" development.
Although I do acknowledge the value of something like Dear Esther (with the stipulation that such products should not be marketed as games at all), I also believe that an interactive experience which requires constant input from the player should be more engaging than Dear Esther is. The player should never be forced to spend more than a minute simply moving from one place to another, with no obstacles or challenges in between. If obstacles or challenges are not desired, then the requirement of constant input from the player is a nuisance. I used to believe that Dear Esther could actually be a good "game" if there were some puzzles to solve along the way, but "Dear Esther with puzzles" is exactly what games like Mind: Path to Thalamus and Pneuma: Breath of Life try to be, and they're not quite effective. Mind: Path to Thalamus at least has some decent puzzles and less of the pointless point-A-to-point-B non-gameplay, but you'll still spend too much time wishing you could walk faster while the narrator philosophizes.
As for games like Neverending Nightmares, I can only assume that developers sometimes run out of ideas and try to beef up the playtime with lots of nothing in between the good parts. This is an awful idea. If your game has 20 minutes of fun, make it a 20-minute game and set the price accordingly. Don't add a bunch of empty rooms and force the player to walk through them. Don't make the game overly repetitive and decrease the player's movement speed. Increased playtime is worth nothing if the extra time spent isn't any fun.
