Seeing some online discussions regarding good games or ‘hidden gems’ got me thinking, what do I care about in a game? I’m sure most people reading this will probably agree that some games are good because they feel good to play but what does that mean? It’s a large part of my life and I’ve played almost every genre, finding gems and shitstains aplenty. There’s way too many games for anyone to keep track off, so I wanna try to be a bit more eloquent than just ‘gaem gud’.

It’s good if it has…

To me, personally, games that have the following traits are usually good games. Or in some cases, ‘hidden gems’.

Good Interactivity with all parts

One of the most important part of a videogame is the interactivity it has. How good are the controls, how you have to time your jumps in a platformer, if it feels slippery, etc. A game that doesn’t play nice with its own interactivity won’t be a good game for most people.

Internal Logic that makes sense

Sure, logic can be thrown out the window with games, but the game itself needs to makes sense, internally. Presented concepts need to make sense for the player and NPCs, otherwise it’s cheating. Games are allowed to cheat a bit (not so blatantly of course) to keep themselves in a higher ground than the player, but the cheat can be explained in many logical ways.

Satisfactory Gameplay Loop

This is how many games fail to do things, and why so many people drop them too. If there’s no reason to continue the adventure, to understand what’s going on, there’s no reason to play it. Narrative or gameplay, or both, can work for this. The story keeps you engaged. The gameplay loop is fun and makes you engaged. The combination of two makes it so that you want to keep playing it and that is a sign that things have worked well.

Satisfactory and Logical Conclusion

All things are finite, and so are games. They can’t go forever or they’ll wither and die in worse ways.

The narrative created for the story can’t leave too many hanging threads, and usually has to solve itself up.

The gameplay loop has to end the game on a high note with a boss battle or similar. Endings can be bittersweet and have many implications but they still need to feel like a chapter has closed.

It’s bad if it has…

This part is where I talk about what happens some traits exist in games. These traits can be good but in some cases, it can be pretty bad. There’s ways you can avoid the bad parts and there’s a limit where too much can loop itself down to be bad.

Too Much Unnecessary Detail

“What?” you’re probably thinking. Yes, detail is important but if there’s too much of it, it can be detrimental to the enjoyment.

Animations that are long-winded (and thus boring) can be a real dampener. Sure, the character might move realistically, but it shouldn’t be at the detriment of the player’s agency. We might not question why Carl Johnson from GTA: San Andreas might be able to do the things he does, but we do question why Arthur Morgan from Red Dead Redemption 2 is so *slow* to do anything.

Ways to Waste the Player’s Time (and Patience)

I think this is the worst one out of the ‘being bad’ bits that games try to avoid but eventually don’t. Something that gets me mad is when games are purposely trying to waste your time. It’s called ‘padding’ and it’s used to stretch things more than they should be. Padding can be just about anything, like collectables or sidequests that add nothing to the story.

The worst part of padding is it’s used to extend a game’s run time. Sure, you need money to continue many games, but the grind for the money will take longer than you think or expect. A 20 hour experience isn’t made better by making it last 50.

‘What about JRPGs?’ I hear you ask. Roleplaying games are long by default. An average TTRPG game can last anything from a year to two years, if the players have a schedule of one per week (54 weeks in a year). They are long by design, so videogames that are also RPGs will be long experiences too.

The issue here is to make you do quests that are repeatable and don’t give out any rewards other than money or experience, like no story progression of any kind. These are things that players don’t want to do again. Random encounters every 5 seconds you walk, wasting your time to get where you need to go. Battles that last 10 seconds that could be skipped.

Bad Controls

It’s hard to describe this one, and it’s one type makes all gamers mad when gaming journalists talk about it. But you can feel it. You can sense that something is off with the control when it doesn’t do what you ordered it to. Interactivity is a major component, and the controls are the way that this interactivity gets done by the player. If you can’t click on something that is visible on your screen, if the character moves left when you clearly went towards the right, it’s a sign that the controls are busted.

Violation of Established Rules in a Very Obvious and Obnoxious Way

Games present their world, lore and other things in a matter that is easy to understand. However if the game violates its own rules in a way that is not explained in any way while being super obvious, it’s what I call bad.

As I said, games are allowed to cheat a little to make things challenging, as long it’s not terrible. Several chase missions in GTA: San Andreas will teleport the cars closer to the player’s radius in order to keep it engaging. You can find this out when you stop your car and kill the drivers, then keep looking back, the cars will be teleported closer to you but won’t chase you because its drivers are dead.

The real issue is when the game just goes bonkers on powering up something that does not come with any warning or just making things exist out of nowhere without any prior established context.

Since I’m talking about GTA: San Andreas, how about the mission ‘High Noon’, where you kill Officer Eddie Pulaski? The start of the mission has the main character going to deliver a dossier to Officer Frank Tenpenny. He leaves Pulaski and you might expect this to be like a fist fight because Tenpenny took the only car available away, meaning that they are stranded in the desert. After the cutscene is over, suddenly Pulaski gets inside a white vehicle that wasn’t there before the mission or during the cutscene and drives away, turning the mission into a chase. What?

It’s that sort of thing that I’m talking about. I’m sure you have examples of this too.

Performance that makes it unplayable

I chose this one carefully because different people have different takes on what performance means. A game should run optimally at 30 FPS with a good resolution, and no problems with controls or latency. This is the bare minimum, mind you. If the game can’t do that, then it’s not really worth it.

Doing 120 FPS at 4K might be desirable for someone out there, but it’s not for me. However no matter what PC or console used, if it still has bad controls and latency issues, as well framedrops that affect gameplay then it’s unplayable.

Back in the day, these things weren’t as noticeable as they are now, but you can still tell that performance wasn’t the concern. Does it make it bad? No, there are multiple games that have poor performance and are still gems. But nowadays, it’s expected to perform well out of the box and devs are skimping on it. No real excuse for this behavior, because computers are as strong as they could be nowadays and we can still see issues.

Closing Words

There’s more things that could make stuff good or bad. I didn’t mention tackled on multiplayer because sometimes it can be good (like Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer), or bad, (like Gacha mechanics), but those are not exactly things I can say they are what I think they are bad in general. Gacha mechanics can still exist in games, like in a form of an in-game casino that rewards you with in-game money and the like, so it can be a bit fun to engage with it.

But all things are finite and this is where this post ends. Not to say I’m someone with all the knowledge in the world, but this is exactly how I feel when I play a game, and eventually conclude that it’s good or bad.