@TriforceBunPolygon had a surprisingly self-aware
article today about Donkey Kong Bananza's GOTY prospects:
Polygon said:The Game Awards jury is mostly made up of a broad international selection of specialist and mainstream media outlets, so a good (preferably 90-plus) rating on the review aggregation sites — which also sample widely among critics — is a good indicator of strength in the awards race, with some caveats.
One of those caveats is genre bias toward cinematic, story-focused action-adventure and role-playing games, which might have counted against a family-friendly game like Bananza in the past. But last year’s GOTY win for Astro Bot, a game very much in the mold of Nintendo’s great platformers, opens the way for DK to push through to the front of the field this year.
An interesting, positive behind-the-scenes narrative is also appealing to the jury, which is one reason I think Clair Obscur — a left-field, mid-budget title from a first-time developer and upstart publisher taking the fight to the big boys — is the current front-runner. “Nintendo makes excellent platform game” hardly qualifies in this regard, although the return of Donkey Kong — one of gaming’s earliest stars — to prominence on Switch 2 with his first major production in a long time is quite an appealing story.
A bias towards cinematic story-driven games and attention-grabbing behind-the-scenes narratives absolutely plays into game reviews. Critics aren't even
totally wrong to do this. There is a fun element of surprise when something like Blue Prince comes out of nowhere.
This is reinforced by critics "needing" to deliver their reviews on a tight schedule, which draws their focus only to the first playthrough of a game. I think of how mindblowing Frog Fractions was, but do I want to replay it? It's the definition of shallow wow factor that works once. Up until a few months ago I had it rated as a 9/10 in the game database here, but I've been going through and adjusting my ratings as my taste gravitates away from that stuff (which is ultimately empty even
during a first playthrough once you know the tricks) and more towards the classics that I'll be replaying for decades to come. It's harder to drive a conversation that way though (what more is there to say about A Link to the Past?), so I can see how being so strongly embedded in the online gaming community and incentivized to spark interest could cause someone to derive more excitement from shock value than from "one of the best sidescrollers ever."
