Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom – you can’t please everyone (Picture: Nintendo)
A reader is confused and frustrated by the fact that he didn’t enjoy Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom, Baldur’s Gate 3 or Cocoon last year.
Before I start, I’m going to admit that this is clearly my fault, not the games’. I’m not angry at the quality of any of them, I’m upset that I seem to have hit some kind of brick wall, where no matter what the game is I just don’t enjoy it. Have I grown out of games? Have I got too picky? Was I somehow in a bad mood for all 12 months of last year? I don’t remember it as that, but maybe I was. Whatever’s going on I’m kind of worried that I just don’t like video games anymore.
I have a PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch, so got to play most of last year’s biggest games. The one I was most looking forward to was Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom, but I ended up being pretty disappointed by it. It’s not bad, of course, but I found it very bloated and unfocused, in a way that most people accuse Ubisoft games of being.
The sky islands and depths were barely in the game, unless you purposefully went there, and the Ultrahand stuff was the same. It was used a bit in the story missions but not very much and was a pretty minor part of the game overall, if you didn’t take it upon yourself to play around with it more. I think it was very telling it played no part at all in the final boss battle or anything leading up to it.
Super Mario Bros. Wonder was also a disappointment. I enjoyed it at first – very imaginative – but then a few hours later I realised I was already a third of the way through it. A couple of days later and I’d beaten it all. At the time it all seemed very clever, but I remember very little of it now, as if it went in one ear and out the other.
Next up (or did it come out earlier? Not that it matters) was Baldur’s Gate 3, which I did not get on with at all. I know there were plenty of warnings in the reviews and such, but I found it ridiculously overcomplicated for what it was trying to do, and I’m not surprised so many people didn’t beat the tutorial. I almost gave up myself as it didn’t teach you half of the controls and I just ended up wandering around confused, not able to get anything working.
I persevered but despite all the talk about the story I found the characters to be kind of basic and the voice-acting was not good, which was not what I was led to believe. I don’t know, maybe I’d just set my heart against it by that point but that’s definitely one game I wish I’d bought physically so I could sell it on (it’s digital-only).
So, disappointed by all that I decided to give an indie game a go and bought Cocoon… and I didn’t like that either. The puzzles were quite clever, but it was very contrived and the complete lack of explanation for what was going on got more and more annoying as the game went on. Yes, you can sort of piece together what it might be about, but it doesn’t add up to much and it makes the whole thing seem pretentious.
Overall, 2023 was not a good year for me when it came to video games. I keep wondering if I should’ve got Resident Evil 4, considering I love the original, but given how I got on with everything else I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.
I don’t really like to think I have bad taste in video games, but does this prove I do? Have I fallen out of step with what’s popular? Do I just not like video games anymore? I was perfectly happy the year before, so what happened so suddenly? There’s nothing much on the horizon this year, so far, that interests me but I’m almost afraid of what happens when there is. What if I don’t like that either? Is that the end of me and video games? I used to really like them…
By reader Sharpie