It’s so deep abd so complicated, and blurs the line between literary and mechanical so expertly, that i cannot explain it without spoiling it.

Its very good, very literary, and about solving a murder. Your skills are your character’s inner monologue, and they’re all useful, but ypure kind of choosing what clues and what sort of language you get them in, how you interact with and literally read the world.

So play it, play it without reading anything else about it, and when picking skills, go with what you respond to or what character you want your detective to be. ‘Phillip marlowe’ ‘sherlock holmes’ and ‘dirk gently’ are pretty close to the three pre-sets.

It’s the only visual novel I’ve ever played, but it excels so much at it. The writing, worldbuilding, characters, narrator, and overall “vibe” are fantastically superb. It’s also another one of those games that I can’t help but play for ~5 hours nearly every day until I finish it. I’m no video game connoisseur, so you can find more sophisticated reviews elsewhere. You can pick it up on GOG for like €10 half of the time.

We got another one girls, get em in the hug pit!

I wouldn’t say so - I was fully engaged throughout my entire playthrough.

Earthbound 3, i think?

Added

Certain parts of the game haven’t aged well, but there’s no denying that Vaas was a wonderfully done villain. He’s a great test case for the “a good villain can’t be absent and mysterious” argument. Most of the memorable villains in gaming have been nearly omnipresent; Vaas, GladOS, Andrew Ryan, Handsome Jack, etc…

All of them are good villains because they are consistently present. They have enough screen time to actually develop into full fledged characters. They’re not just some dark and mysterious overlord, patiently waiting in the bottom of a dungeon for you to come fight them. They’re persistently in your face, interacting with you. Even if they’re not actively hindering your progress, the fact that they have a continued presence means their eventual downfall is that much more satisfying.

Fair enough, ill still leave it solely for the “definition of insanity” meme origin

I don’t even. Every individual part of RDR2 is pretty good. It looks good, sounds good, the writing really deserves recognition for managing to keep a 100 hour plot interesting and at no point was it ever clear to me why this needed to be an interactive medium because the gameplay and all the other bits don’t really interface. Inside missions you can’t leave the very narrow developer intended path at all, your choices boil down to “what gun do I shoot this guy with”. Outside of missions you’re free to do “whatever” except whatever is also just mostly shooting guys or animals - none of which you have to do or affect anything.

The exploration is and stumbling upon odd sidequests initially is like the only part where it makes sense to be a game, because you couldn’t recreate that in another medium and some even ask of you, the player, to use your noggin to solve shit. All the rest of it though, you could basically get the same experience by watching The Sopranos and after every episode you finish a level of Quake.

Which on it’s own would be fine, a piece of art can just be a good time for a (long) while and that’s good but RDR2 ranks among there as the most expensive videogame, especially if you exclude obvious scams like Star Citizen and live service games like WoW that have just been getting content forever and everybody involved in the production was reportedly forced into insane crunch times to make the horse balls react to temperature. And for what?