10 Video Games Made INTENTIONALLY Bad To Prove A Point
2. E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy
E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy is brilliant.
It is also bonkers.
The development studio behind this bizarre and philosophical title has admitted they released it without specific features and aimed for a more obscurantist, inaccessible design philosophy that might alienate lots of players.
In an interview with GamaSutra, the developers talk at length about various different elements that went into designing this cyberpunk-RPG-shooter. The game itself is based on a cyberpunk tabletop RPG, AVA, that the studio internally developed and never released. On top of that, it has only had a scant dozen designers throughout its process, which is why Streum decided to release the game despite the bugs it knew the game had.
Streum had also received criticism for a lack of simplified weapon reloading and quick saves (alongside several other features that are poorly explained), to which the developer replied:
"We believe the role from the developers is not necessarily to please the player, nor to simplify the games. Doing that might drive to what is more and more frequent: a standardization of the market."
Alongside all of these purposefully arcane or obscured features, Streum admits it purposefully chose what it thought was a worse ending for its game. It chose to give the game a particularly ambiguous ending, saying "we did not have the courage to bring a definitive and significant ending.
The studio went for an intentionally weaker ending, in order to avoid any potential infringements or devaluation of player choices.