"When you can do everything, the hardest part is doing anything."
— Dark Chronicle ad
"After watching a decent Let's Play of the game, going over the wiki a few times, and a six-week preparation with a team of advisers and physical trainers, I was able to break through the wall. And I suppose that's the first failing of Dark Souls: it's that you need the fucking Cliffs Notes to get into it."
"Some call it a Platformer game, some call it an Adventure game, I classify it as a Where The Fuck Do I Go kinda game. Yeah, one of those."
"I keep thinking of the recent afternoon I spent watching a friend playing The Saboteur. As I looked on, I was a little overwhelmed by how much stuff was going on. It was all over the place. The Saboteur! It's a racing game! It's a stealth game! It's a shooter! It's a brawler! It's a sandbox! It's a riveting tale of loss, revenge, and heroism! It's sexy, funny, and badass! It mixes the artsy cabaret style of the 1940s with sex jokes and Nazi-battling action any twit can appreciate! It's a Goddamned Katamari of unrelated objects slammed together into a single mass!"
"[Design director Matt Armstrong] compares [having lots of newly unlocked abilities] to having a big bucket of LEGOs, and simply emptying them all out on the table and saying, 'There's fun here. It's in there somewhere. See you later.' There were some players who were able to take the LEGO bricks and build them into something vaguely coherent. And there were some players who just looked at it [and said], 'I don't even know where to start?'"
"I seriously cannot recommend Samus Returns enough. It's just an exceptionally awesome title that harkens back to a time when a videogame just let you cry and figure it out."
—Chris Dickson, Nintendo Nerdery
Lana: There's something about this era. There's a hundred different paths he can take, and a thousand ways he can go about it. Sometimes he'll scour Hyrule for the Sheikah Shrines, and other times he'll ignore them after he gets off the Great Plateau. Sometimes he'll spend, like, seventeen thousand rupees on clothes and armour to make sure he's well-equipped for any situation, and other times he'll opt to cook elixirs for the weather and just tough out the combat. Sometimes he recollects all of his memories before he makes it to the Calamity... and sometimes he'll never even get his tunic back from Impa.
Cia: That can't be-
Lana: It is, though. The Divine Beasts are the same. Sometimes he'll free them all, sometimes he'll get half of them before he panics worrying about Zelda, and sometimes he'll completely disregard them. Even the Master Sword. One time, he ended up at Korok Forest and drew it before he ever saw Kakariko. Other times, it's sat there, and he never even saw the Deku Tree. There's so much fluidity to this era.
"Oh no. No, no, no, no, it can't be. It is! It's an open-world game! Good god! Quickly! Block it off! Oh! Thank goodness, Stanley. What a close call. You nearly wandered off into that — that thing! That big open — just wandering around, no right or wrong directions! No path to follow! You can just go in any — [groaning] Oh, thank heavens we avoided it! We're out of the woods now, Stanley. Okay, I'm going to get us out of here, let's find another game. Preferably something with walls, something with nice big insurmountable walls."
— The Narrator during the "Games" ending, The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe
"Wasteland's got it's own golden rule: Thou shalt get sidetracked by bullshit every goddamn time!"
— The Ghoul, Fallout (2024)
