Friday wrote:Breath of the Wild felt like a legit escape when I played it a few months ago. It doesn't demand anything of you. It was good for my depression because it felt nice to just slip into a green world that I could just fuck around and ride horses in. Doubly so when I discovered Hawaii was in the game.
I don't know why I haven't finished BotW; I like it well enough.
I do like brobdingnagian fuck-you open-world games, in general. I've played a fair few of them, liked many of them, and finished a double-digit number of them.
(Where "finished" means beat the last boss and watched the credits until I got bored sitting through the slow-ass credits crawl. Fortunately, I have no compulsion to 100% anything and will happily say "no, fuck this" when there's a sidequest or challenge I'm not enjoying. No, Batman game, I'm not going to glide through those rings; you're asking me to literally jump through hoops.)
And my enjoyment of any given open-world game is usually based on how much fun I have just fucking around in the world. BotW scores high because there's so much shit to find and do. Spider-Man has the absolute best traversal mechanics of any OW game I've ever played; it's a total blast to swing around Manhattan.
Then you get into stuff like Reedus and the Fetus, and I really like the whole postapocalyptic delivery boy thing, and I even like the intentionally-cumbersome stuff like having to maintain your balance while you're carrying heavy shit, but I quit after awhile because I just hate being interrupted by black goo or having to raid camps or whatever. I'd like Death Stranding a lot better if it wasn't for the death stranding.
(Also, I don't mind the "soothe a crying baby" mechanic, but it's no longer unique to Death Stranding. Every game has "stop to soothe a crying baby" sections now; I just have to wait twenty minutes or so.)