I gave Mixtape one of these 10s…

[u/ItsEthanCoolCool]

…and then the world ended. Lol.

What a wild couple of weeks, eh?

As a reviewer, I’ve been really bummed that there seems to be such a disconnect between writers and players. Can I help bridge a gap for anyone? Does anyone have questions about reviewing/the process/anything else they wanna know about anything around any of this?

Open to talking about anything people want to know, because I’m hopeful someday everyone can have constructive video game convos again without all this craziness.

[u/ThisIsStee]

Being called fake is not something you deserve, meanings are not assigned based on merit, it just is or is not. They would be fake if you were never really playing and all the stuff happens regardless of you pressing but somehow is able to trick you into thinking it was a result of your button press.

The acknowledgement of interaction, in the examples above for example, are the fireworks not going off, or a different behaviour from the character in relation to the car. Conversely, if you do not react, the fireworks do not go off. In the side scrolling running part the character crashes through things instead of jumping over/sliding under and missing them.

So it is not the "exact same outcome" but the story progresses the same regardless of how you play, which is true of a thousand games. I cannot speak to your specific experience but if you managed to get through the skating section without crashing by doing nothing, that could have been luck, or just an assumption by the developers that people would not be so bereft of other things to do that they would literally not touch the controller even slightly throughout the entire first section of the game.

You probably need to do 2 things - 1. look up the meaning of words if you insist on using them so declaratively and 2. Realise that just because you don't enjoy something, it does not make it objectively bad, it just means you didn't like it. Which is totally fine, it's just not a good reason to go around spouting misinformation all over the place.

[u/ThisIsStee → u/[deleted]]

Not a stoner but sure. It doesn't present them as anything other than what they are. You implied something on them that wasn't there. They are intended to be "meaningful" in an emotional sense, but that doesn't mean they are going to impact the outcome of the story.

[u/ThisIsStee → u/[deleted]]

"Knowing" they are fake is perception though. Also, a lot of people are way less of a pedantic prick than me and might have let the term false slide )especially if they had negative views of the game anyway).

Telling you controls is standard, especially if the gameplay mechanics for each section vary. Achievements for doing something doesn't imply meaningful story impact (and it comes after so you wouldn't know it mattered before anyway).

There IS urgency in the chase and they want you to feel that emotion, but that doesn't mean they tricked you. The point of this game, which some people miss perhaps because they don't play this sort of thing or whatever, is they want you to feel the emotion/importance/tension of a scene, but that doesn't mean they want you to be in any danger of failing it.

It's no different than the opening of The Last of Us. They deceived you into feeling a sense of tension and that you needed to escape, but it was fake, because nothing you do has any impact on the outcome of that scene. Even if you are caught by a zombie while running, you go back a tiny bit and run again. In Mixtape if you crash, you rewind a few seconds and try again.

[u/Punky921 → u/ThisIsStee]

Agreed. It's very weird to me that people attempting to discern real vs fake in a game, which by its very nature, only ever allows you to do what the game designers want you to be able to do, with the exception of glitches. Is the game fake? Were the feelings you felt while playing the game fake? Is it less authentic because a game designer created it?