Feel free to replace “friends” with “anyone you know in real life” or even online groups you trust or are close with.
“They”:
and my own personal experience; most games I have bought in the past 10 years have been off of recommendations from r/gamingsuggestions before Reddit went to crap and Lemmy came into existence; and even moreso when it is a personal friend recommending things to me.
Mods, feel free to nuke if this feels too close to advertising or better-suited for !videogamesuggestions@lemmy.zip (my own community); I mean it more as a discussion piece but I don’t run the place.
EDIT: The “not” in the title is optional; I’m asking about both successful and failed recommendations.
Last of Us.
When the first one came out everyone was ranting and raving over it so I picked it up for my PS3. Granted the beginning of the game was an absolute gut punch and I thought I was hooked, I was not. I found the rest of the game so damn boring. I didn’t like the story, I felt it was forced fed to the player, and honestly I just never bothered finishing it. for me it wasn’t fun.
For me is suffered from “show, don’t tell” problems. There are numerous weeks long skips between scenes and you’re just supposed to understand that Joel and Ellie became close during that time. But as a player, you’re basically being asked to babysit someone you’ve known for 10 minutes. It was basically one long escort mission and the “OMG SO AMAZING SCENE” is… giraffes walking by. Like really? That’s what it takes to wow people? Some giraffes walking outside the building???
The world was a generic apocalypse setting, the “story” can be described in a few bullet points, and the big “emotional gut punch” at the end is so cliche.
I’ll die on the hill that it didn’t do a single groundbreaking thing. Nothing about the game wasn’t already done before and better. It’s the equivalent of a summer blockbuster movie: a fun mindless take on an idea but otherwise generic.