12/23/25
There are a bunch of narrative games that sound interesting but really struggle to get myself to play them. Citizen Sleeper and The Forgotten City are a couple in this category.
I played 1000xResist recently with a friend and was able to get through that. I doubt I would have if I hadn’t played with him though. I think I liked this game a lot? But also still feel sort of conflicted about it. The story is undeniably cool and interesting.
Caves of Qud managed to get me invested for a while, but I lost steam there. This seems like an outlier of sorts because it has so much going on systemically.
I seem to REALLY struggle to play games without interesting systemic properties… That said, Citizen Sleeper is a counter here… That game has systems, but it didn’t hook me either.
Elden Ring, Outer Wilds, Return of the Obra Dinn, and The Case of the Golden Idol are all games that I think of as pretty narratively driven that worked well for me. Perhaps, the trick is that they’re not narratively driven though… They’re driven by some other systemic properties and there’s just also a compelling narrative alongside?