I actively get annoyed when games don’t give me some quiet time to not play the game, and I really appreciate the beauty of games beyind the gameplay.

This gave me conniptions when playing Control. I couldn’t just stop and look at the environments, which clearly had a lot of work put into them, for more than a minute without the getting a loud “BRRRR” alarm in my ear and having a full screen text popup that says “BOARD ALERT: HISS COMMANDOS IN WASTE PROCESSING”.

This was compounded by the whole ‘randomly spawn in some random group of enemies at a random point every time you enter a room’ design of the game. That’s bad enough for other reasons, but those two things together gave the impression that the game designers were terrified of the player having 10 seconds to sit there and have a thought enter their brain.

If anything gaming culture has regressed, at least in this aspect.

Remember when the $2.50 Oblivion horse armor DLC was considered to be ridiculous?