- obviously there’s the fact that her critiques of DE are so unabashedly surface-level that you cannot tell if she’s actually played the game or read a plot summary/review of it.
- but there’s also the fact that she’s proposing a supposed improvement on what DE is with her own prompt, which in-and-of-itself is the lowest form of critique in my eyes–‘what if you had an entirely different idea?’
- and then the prompt itself is a doozy:
- she somehow found a way to both critique DE for being unimaginative with its scenario/having a white man protag and propose, in alternative, the absolute whitest possible scenario imaginable
- in the implicit shift from a grimy Eastern Europe to a comfy Western Europe, she’s managed to gentrify her scenario proposed in a critique about diversity
- she wants to keep disco elysium’s, unexamined by her, ‘wonderful writing’, while stripping it of all the rawness and deliberate confrontation that is at the heart of it that would conflict with the idyllic nature of her scenario and her stated opposition to griminess
- her idea of a more diverse story, if we’re taking it as she’s presenting it, is swapping a white guy with a white gal, which, I mean, diversity win, I guess.
- the fact that this is the most generic, safest-possible indie game idea imaginable. I could go on itch.io and find 50 of pretty much that game. this is the idea that like 50% of developers have when they’re thinking of a quick point-and-click game for a game jam.
i could go on, but the most scathing possible point I could make to this tweet is that this person is a BAFTA Judge 
DE’s ‘insanely well crafted narrative system’ and wonderful writing are to serve a point, to create impactful text/subtext through the mechanics that the developers were passionate about. This sort of backseat creativity irks the hell out of me because I promise you if the exact team that made DE set out to make some quirky witch cat game or something, it wouldn’t have been nearly as good. Because the team were passionate about DE’s subject matter and not passionate about quirky witch cat games.
The people passionate about cat witch games are making them and if they’re not as good maybe that says something about the idea. You can’t just take ‘good concept’ and combine it with ‘idea i personally like’ and get good art out of it.
Like, yeah, okay, let’s change the story of the divorced amnesiac suicidal drunkard in a decaying town trying to solve an apparent lynching into Harriet Potter and the Live Laugh Lost Kitty, but please oh please maintain the vacuous idea of “good writing and mechanics”, as if the writing which is grimy and confrontational and political and raw and the mechanics which are meant to represent how Harry thinks specifically is something you can just rip cleanly from the world they wanted to build and put into the idyllic Switzerland cat pastel game
fuckin lmao that’s hilarious
I wonder what she thinks about Calico, which is probably reasonably close to what she’s describing.
Alternatively, it would be good but also not resemble what miss BAFTA judge had in mind, leading her to complain about that game too.
Rosa Carbó-Mascarell when the quirky witch cat game by Robert Kurvitz that she requested has the protagonist kill themself to win an argument