Let’s talk about how much I dislike games like Jedi: Fallen Order. This game is one of those games that I bought on impulse because of EAs game purchasing plan which allowed employees to buy games for points. It’s a jump puzzle game that punishes the player through various strategies. The primary one is a save system that requires the player to save in a specific location. To me, this is a way of dictating to the player how long they must play before they can put the controller down. Because the save points are unevenly distributed in the levels, leaving one save point to journey to the next one is taking a risk. Dying before you reach it sets you back all the way to the previous save point.

This also ties into regaining health and health stims. If you want to do that you also have to be prepared of having all enemies respawn.

This means that you have ot redo all the combat in that area in order to regain health and stims, which means that the progression you’ve made, especially with difficult enemies is unmade as soon as you choose to health up.

This is all before the fact that if a difficult enemy kills you, they’ll also remove all your progression in the form of XP. You may get it back if you manage to hit them, but if you die by another enemy’s hand before that, you will have lost all of it.

I’m not much for jumping puzzle games, and Fallen Order is all about jumping puzzles. In addition, I find the animations to be uneven and janky, not very fluent, which I suspect has to do with this being a game that seems to have been made for PC. At least that’s how it seems when I play. The Witcher 3 is the same, a twitchy and finicky player character to control, but The Witcher is more forgiving in that I’m not expected to fight quite in the same way.

I never play games with the intent of punishing the player, with a few exceptions. Darkest Dungeon and Hades. They are very up front with their quirks though, I know what I’ll get. I don’t have to figure it out as I go.

I’ve been playing progressively more awful game as I’ve gone along. Fallen Order is the opposite of my tastes and I have a hard time seeing how I’ll ever finish it, even with the habit I’m trying to uphold, to play at least 30 minutes a day. God of War was at least tolerable towards the end, and fairly short and compared to Fallen Order and God of War, The Witcher was a pure delight.

I’m not really writing this to slam games like these. I do understand that I’m no the audience for a game such as this, but that is the point.

We have to learn that not all games suit all players, but we honestly suck at that. As developers, we’re too convinced that whatever we like, other players will like.

Maybe things like these are easier to see from an outside perspective. I’ve never been the target audience of almost any game, which is without a doubt the result of this industry being completely male dominated, and male dominated at that from a very specific culture.

I care about games. I care about them because I don’t think they should be limited to such a small portion of humanity. I want to feel that games are for me as well. The way things stand with games like Jedi: Fallen Order, God of War and The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt, this is not the case.

So I will point out issues and I will continue pointing out issues with popular games that do absolutely nothing for me.

I wish there was a game that suited me perfectly, but so far, no such luck.