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Keep Liking What I Don't Like: Art, Kitsch, and Video Games

A comic in which one person is watching sports, a second starts mocking this, and the first covers the second's mouth and says, 'Let people enjoy things.'

https://www.instagram.com/p/BQJRw2ygflf/

Oh no! You just found out that somebody likes a thing you don’t like. What do you do?

If your answer is “keep my mouth shut so they can keep enjoying the thing even though I know it’s trash,” then I congratulate you for at least mastering the first step of basic civility. But there’s another step beyond that one: open-mindedness. It’s recognizing that you almost certainly don’t know that the thing is trash. It’s genuinely seeking to understand what it is that people enjoy about the thing. And if you master this step too, your life can be much richer.

I’m going to explain why this is the case, but first I need to talk about kitsch for a minute - after all, “kitsch” is practically shorthand for “art only liked by people with worse taste than me.”

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Capsule Review: Night in the Woods

A character-driven narrative mystery game with occasional platform/rhythm/adventure game elements. Play as Mae, twenty-year-old college dropout returning to her hometown of Possum Springs and reuniting with her family and friends and confronting how things have changed. Gameplay is mostly a matter of exploring the town, talking to inhabitants and passers-through, and deciding which friend to spend the evening with on each day.

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Capsule Review: Go Vacation

A sports minigame collection set in an island resort. Activities range widely from table hockey to skydiving to playing a glass harp, connected by a surprisingly rich hub world to explore and featuring a surprising amount of customization in the form of outfits, vehicle skins, a variety of dogs that can follow you around, and a villa for the player to lay out and furnish.

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Capsule Review: Dust: An Elysian Tail

A 2D action RPG Metroidvania that feels like it’s set in an animated movie, because it basically is. Play as the amnesiac Dust exploring varied environments and fighting monsters to find answers and help people out along the way. While not everyone likes the art style (which is somewhere between Vanillaware and The Secret of NIMH) I found it beautiful.

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Capsule Review: Kamiko

A short and simple retro-styled game that feels like an essentialized homage to Zelda dungeons. As any of three shrine maidens, progress through a series of four levels defeating enemies and solving simple puzzles to reach and cleanse four gates which also act as save points. Once you’ve cleansed all four, fight a boss and proceed to the next level.

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Capsule Review: Stardew Valley

A life sim that casts you primarily as a farmer growing crops and raising livestock but also features fishing, cooking, crafting, mining, combat, and romanceable NPCs. The game is heavily influenced by the old Harvest Moon or Story of Seasons games, and is presented in a similar three-quarters overhead pixel-art style.

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Capsule Review: Human Resource Machine

A puzzle game tasking the player with writing simple programs to manipulate numbers. Eleven different programming commands are available as building blocks for conquering forty one increasingly-complex challenges. Most puzzles also have optional goals to optimize your program’s line count and execution time. The experience is lightly wrapped in a shallow but ironic story that has your program executed by a human office worker doing pointless work to climb a corporate ladder.

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Capsule Review: Ikachan

A bite-sized pixel-art underwater Metroidvania starring a squid. Swim to explore your environment, get new abilities, and do favors for sea urchins. It’s a solid foundation that feels more like a proof of concept than a finished game, clocking in at about an hour and leaving most of its ideas undeveloped.

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Capsule Review: Fire Emblem Warriors

A Musou game set in a crossover Fire Emblem world, featuring a few original characters and many from previous games - mostly Awakening, Fates, and Shadow Dragon. As is standard for Musou crossover games, elements from the franchise have been incorporated into the standard large-scale hack-and-slash gameplay - and Fire Emblem turns out to be a shockingly good fit, resulting in easily the mechanically-best Musou gameplay I’ve ever experienced.

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