Expedition 33 is slop

On paper everything about this game sounds like it should actually be good. It looks artsy, the gameplay is serviceable and not totally derivative, none of the main characters feel unrelatable nor grating, and the story displays signs of basic writer competency (a very high bar to clear for a vidjagaem). Yet when I play it feels absolutely average and unexceptional at every single level, it evokes very little other than indifference in me.

There's just something about it... It feels too polished and smooth around the edges. There's nothing about it that's actually transgressive, challenging, or unusual the way it's indie aesthetics would imply it to be. Everything feels too broadly appealing, too sanitized, too uncontroversial, too safe... It isn't the typical AAA mass-market trash that gets pushed out by big studios for the lowest common denominator consumer, but it could as well be. It's stealth slop.

Yeah, I can see what you mean. I don't know what the talk was around the game with what people claimed it was, or what the game was trying to present itself as. I got it after seeing the hype around it. Simply a passable french jrpg.

Most similar experience I can relate it to was back when Remember Me came out. Good ideas, but the execution fell short of the mark. Nice of them to make it cheap though.

It's the same as with any of these fucking overhyped games. People are so used to getting dogshit that the moment something comes out that is just ordinary good or great they pass it off as the greatest thing ever. Baldurs Gate 3 isn't anything more than DOS2 but with dicerolls, worse combat and cinematic dialogue. Elden Ring is just Dark Souls but missing the fucking point. Silk Song is just a metroidvania, literally just that, A metroidvania.

And yet people shit themselves with cum over them.

Don't trust the unwashed masses and their praise of greatness, they don't have a barometer of quality to begin with.