I wonder what it’s like to be as endlessly cynical, unpleasant, and downright mean about video games (while writing about them for a living) as most of Kill Screen’s contributors.

Oh jeez, this article is hard to read. The author makes it a point to stress that this game could well be excellent (and certainly looks that way), but that he’ll never play it and hates it on principle. The reason? He believes that games made with “sentiment” and “heart” are “troubling.” He holds this view based on a misguided notion that “fun” and “emotion” are mutually exclusive (while professing the opposite), and based on the paranoid and insecure idea that, merely by putting out games with heart, developers are insinuating that he’s stupid for liking more traditional, mechanics-based games. 

Actually, he proposes two very different views of these developers that are hard to square: He paints them as snooty crusaders for “sentimentalism,” who would look down on anybody for enjoying the pedestrian pleasures of “fun” games; but he also paints them as cynical corporations in the business of “the commodification of childhood” for the purposes of marketing and a quick buck. There’s no good evidence of either of these characterizations, and they certainly don’t make sense concurrently.

I submit that if you hear a developer say “I want to make something emotional; something with heart,” and you immediately think (without any evidence whatsoever) that the resulting game will “sacrifice ‘fun’ at the altar of ‘emotion,’ thereby reinforcing the false binary that says you’re either dumb or you feel things,” that’s on you. That idea is contained nowhere in the original statement, so if you’re somehow getting that message, it may be wise to look inward and figure out why. In any event, whether or not a problem truly exists here, there’s no way that this - angrily railing against games you haven’t played and developers who just want to make something they care about - could possibly be the solution.