I did not enjoy Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Playing it felt like a chore much of the time. I was satisfied, though, when I finished it. This juxtaposition made me think more about how I feel about games and gaming.
There are games that I enjoy playing and that make me feel satisfied when I finish them (most RPGs). There are also games that I enjoy playing that leave me feeling unsatisfied when I finish them (Roguelites). Many games are somewhere in the middle – for example, grand strategy games such as Europa Universalis IV or Civilization get me into a flowstate, and there is satisfaction in seeing a nation develop over the course of a 10-hour multi-session save. All the same, completing that save (particularly in Civilization) feels empty. Some story-heavy games, like Disco Elysium or 1000x Resist, make it harder to start a gaming session as there is a lot of context or the game is hard to navigate. As the story develops and the game world unfolds, though, there’s a deep satisfaction and I think about the game for weeks afterwards.
As I’ve matured and become more responsible, too, my gaming sessions have come in shorter intervals. While console sleep functions have been helpful, there is still a mental effort to starting a game session, whether it’s gameplay context (such as “what build was I going for”) or story context (such as “why did I accept this quest from a guy I don’t like”) and sometimes that context required to start a session will make me pick another game rather than continuing a game I would otherwise enjoy.
Therefore, in the spirit of videolamer’s consistent defense and emphasis on definitive, objective ratings-based systems, I propose a new three-pronged ratings system so that you will know what to expect when starting a new game (because you, a winner reading a WordPress website in 2025, are exactly like me, a loser posting on a WordPress website in 2025):
* Inertia: How hard is it to start a session of a given game?
* Flow: Once you have overcome inertia, is the game pleasant to play?
* Satisfaction: Once you have completed the game, do you feel like your time was well spent?
To make things easy to understand, the ideal game would probably score low on the first and high on the second and third of these categories – being easy to get into, addictive, and feeling fulfilling afterwards.
Some sample ratings:
Spelunky
* Inertia: Low
* Flow: High
* Satisfaction: Medium
This ratings system may not be well suited to Spelunky in particular, since “game completion” may be out of reach for many of us lesser gamers. Satisfaction here, though, might mean something like “I finally got past the jungle stages.”
Disco Elysium
* Inertia: Medium
* Flow: Medium
* Satisfaction: High
Frequently, it can be difficult to figure out what exactly to do to make progress in Disco Elysium – although doing less meaningful things is also a part of the point, and stumbling through things is really just proper role-playing. It scores lower on the Inertia part of the scale than other story-heavy games in part because so many interactions are self-contained and it has a good journal system.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
* Inertia: High
* Flow: Low
* Satisfaction: High
As mentioned, the inspiration for this ratings system was this widely-praised game. While I found it was still satisfying, and much of the praise merited, it is hard for me to describe why I didn’t enjoy it. It has no journal or quest tracking (ironic given a main story point is keeping a journal), is difficult to navigate, requires twitch-based learning of enemy attack patterns, and on top of it has a dark story sparsely told – so while it scores high on Satisfaction here, your session-to-session satisfaction may be relatively low.
Sailing Era
* Inertia: Low
* Flow: High
* Satisfaction: Low
I played probably 100 hours of Sailing Era, an open-world sandbox sailing RPG, and it is an absolute dream to play. You can make progress in 15-minute increments easily, the auto-sail feature means you can largely not even pay attention to it, there are a lot of little details to pay attention to and optimize if you do pay attention, and there is a ton of stuff to find. Ultimately though there is no real endgame – once you’ve mapped roughly half of the world, there are only a couple major challenges to face, recruiting new sailors becomes meaningless, trading stops requiring thought, and everything feels like it takes too long. Despite that, I continued playing it and completed all 5 storylines because it is the perfect “I want comfort food” game.