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| Jaicee said: You know, you're right, Enslaved actually does feel kind of like a spiritual successor to what Beyond Good & Evil had been before it. I hadn't been able to put my finger on just what felt so oddly familiar about it to me before you put it that way! Now Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom is a title I don't remember, probably for the same reason you didn't recall Enslaved: it's just been a long time since then. Looks kind of interesting though. Has that same very distinct kind of vibe to it in that screen shot you shared. My top 50 list skews heavily recent, being composed mostly of games from 2011 on, with nearly all of them falling into what's considered the indie category. There's just so much more variety out there that way today than there's ever been before and so many more topics and settings we're seeing games take on so much and experimenting with so many different play styles and genre combinations and refinements that I can't help feeling a revived interest, at least in this particular scene of gaming. It feels like the way things used to be before game companies got too massive to be adept and development costs got too astronomical to permit much real risk-taking. I like that. I really do. We're also headed toward the women's revolution in gaming (which I have pegged as essentially 2012-17, overlapping with some larger cultural trends that were somewhat analogous but also somewhat not) at this point in terms in terms of years we're covering with these threads and yeah, that helped a lot for me too, especially where those trends seemed to overlap. And also toward the onset of "normcore" (ya know, Lorde, The Hunger Games, The Last of Us, no brand names plastered all over people's clothes, Great Recession economic crisis aura, etc.), which sorta displaced the previous cultural emphasis on indulgence and extravagance and also a general aura that I related to more. |
Majin came out at the wrong time I guess, less than 2 months after Enslaved and at the end of the year (November 23rd) after the big hitters had already gobbled up the sales. The cover didn't look very promising either and reviews were harping on the graphics and unoriginal game play (I disagree)
Also at a time indies became increasingly popular offering similar hours of game play for much lower prices. Indie games killed the A game genre. People only wanted to pay full price for polished AAA games with shiny graphics and 'mature' themes. I was one of them, picked this game up in a bargain bin in 2011 for $10... I played the demo when it came out, hence I recognized it later. Yet didn't feel like paying $60 at the time after reading the reviews. I should have just trusted my gut. Now these kind of games are gone.
I guess Moss Book 1+2 together counts as a vaguely similar kind of experience. I do enjoy indie games yet so many are rogue-lites with procedural generation to reduce costs and improve game length. I guess it makes fully handcrafted games like Cocoon stand out all the better :)
