i don’t think it deserved to win everything— there were some incredible games nominated that i feel would’ve been better suited for specific categories (plus, i think that the game awards should be a celebration of games, and having one game sweep is a little reductive— but that’s a different topic entirely). however, it feels like some people saw the success of expedition 33 and tried to find something wrong with it afterwards.

sandfall was experimenting with ai in 2022 when it was brand new and shiny, and many people were doing the same: snapcube with sonic destruction, markiplier with his reaction content— and none of them had people lashing out like what is happening now. the end result was that they had the placeholder textures, literally said that “it felt wrong” (https://www.tumblr.com/kitsuleif/803773974098165760/exactly-what-i-expected-experimenting-with-new) and removed them.

i’m not comparing the two movies, because that’s an idea for a different post— but we need to kill the idea that a slow movie is a bad movie. slow movies let the audience breathe; they let the audience ruminate and think about what the movie is telling them instead of mindlessly consuming that media. movies put out recently are so full of stimulation that they don’t let their audience engage with it— we’re just silent watchers.