Illustration by Lauren Cheung

In The Pigeon’s first issue, we here at the Games and Tech Corner wrote a piece about the recent Game Awards – the annual awards ceremony highlighting and celebrating everything that the industry had accomplished within the year. We did so with both high praise for this year’s titles and with an almost speculative joy about what was to come in the future.

As for a brief summary of how this year’s awards went, for the most part, the critically acclaimed breakout title “Clair Obscur: Expedition 33” swept in virtually every category it went up for. It took home a record-breaking nine awards, including the ultimate title of Game of the Year, which was no small feat given its competition.

Over the coming days however, most of the award winners found themselves receiving what could be described as baseless, surface-level criticism, with Expedition 33 at the centre of it all.

This in itself is hardly unusual. Prior winners such as Baldur’s Gate 3 and Elden Ring, both generationally acclaimed titles, found themselves at the ire of a mob of angry gamers, who declared the awards to be a sham because of their victories.

As for why, the pessimist in me believes people simply enjoy being contrarians. My working theory, however, is that these games, all in their own way, struggle with a wide audience appeal. Take Elden Ring, for example, a game known for being ridiculously hard and having a relatively confusing plotline that requires multiple playthroughs to even really understand.

On the surface alone, the title struggles to feel accessible, which in turn opens it up for general audiences to give criticism in the only way they can, which is often surface-level, misrepresentative of the game, or just plain wrong.

A problem the hobby will always have is that the community is diversely made up of very casual gamers, who play very accessible popular games, and passionate gamers, who play a much wider range of titles. In this, it’s only natural that the two will find themselves at odds with one another whenever award ceremonies roll around. Where one group has endeavoured to play a wide range of titles, the other has only observed it being played, or perhaps never interacted with it at all.

This is the true problem with a lot of gamers: we simply cannot find a middle ground with one another, bar the shared love of the game, and until the hobby can overcome these differences and learn to form critical, but fair reviews and thoughts on titles, we will see these same problems arising year after year.

My opinion, one that I know is shared by many other reviewers, is that Expedition 33 deserved its accolades this year. Between the fantastic performances, gut-wrenching story and unique spin on the RPG genre from a new studio, it truly stands out as one of the best games of all time.

I still hold it in my heart that we can all come together and celebrate the games we love, and the appreciation we have for them that makes us so different. After all, it is the ability to have a difference of opinion and passion that makes this industry what it is today.