Thread by @BretDevereaux

I really find myself wishing more game reviewers took just a brief break from discussing graphics and gameplay and features and just included in every review: "I think this game attempted to evoke <feeling1/feeling2...> and it <succeeded/failed>."

Especially for more story oriented games, I want to know if it made you feel a feeling, and if so - what feeling was that?

By way of example, Frostpunk and Cities: Skylines could both be mechanically reviewed as "Very capable, mechanically deep, pretty, city-builders"...

But that review is kind of useless - they are very much not interchangeable. Contrast:
Frostpunk tries to make you feel hopeless despair, followed by triumphant recovery, followed by sorrowful reflection at the costs; it largely succeeds....

Cities: Skylines evokes a the intellectual satisfaction of puzzle solving while trying to avoid the frustration of failure to allow a stress-free, low-emotion zen-like play-style. It usually succeeds, but some frustration creeps in from time to time.

Way more useful, right?

I think about this a lot for RPGs especially. The emotional experience of games that have a strong 'triumphant hero' narrative (Skyrim, PillarsI) is different from the often cynical&honestly misanthropic 'decisions have consequences' genre (Wasteland2, D:Original Sin I and II).

Without spoiling endings, a good review ought to tell me to what degree a game is indulging in those strands.

Of course, part of this is just me being so tired of the raw adolescent cynicism which permeates the industry. Tired of apparently good actions being wrong because the writer says so, or just relentlessly misanthropic worldbuilding (lookin' at you, Rockstar).