Whenever you decide to buck general rules in video games you risk coming off as capricious. The only way to make it work IME is to clearly indicate from the beginning that you aren’t playing a game that adheres to typical rules OR you build a system that masks it so convincingly that people start questioning what the rules even are on their own. It’s kind of like going to see a magician: you know magic isn’t real, but when you see a really fucking awesome trick, you allow yourself to suspend your disbelief for at least a split second.
DDLC was cool, then it was cool to hate it, now it’s not a surprise anymore and has landed somewhere in the middle with I think most folks acknowledging it was a cool example of messing with the harem/dating sim formula. What I liked about it was how I spent a lot of the game figuring out what the rules were (I knew it was not a conventional harem game and I knew it had horror elements, but I really went out of my way to go in with as little information as possible). I kind of think that’s where the special sauce is if you want to break the “shackles” of things like outside/dungeon/town. BG3 had that magic for most of the first act I think for a lot of people, which I also think carried a lot of its success (and rightfully so). Once we saw behind the curtain it made a little more sense, but when you first dropped into that game it wasn’t clear what the boundaries or consequences were. The matrix wasn’t laid out before you. That’s the key.
DDLC was cool, then it was cool to hate it, now it’s not a surprise anymore and has landed somewhere in the middle with I think most folks acknowledging it was a cool example of messing with the harem/dating sim formula. What I liked about it was how I spent a lot of the game figuring out what the rules were (I knew it was not a conventional harem game and I knew it had horror elements, but I really went out of my way to go in with as little information as possible). I kind of think that’s where the special sauce is if you want to break the “shackles” of things like outside/dungeon/town. BG3 had that magic for most of the first act I think for a lot of people, which I also think carried a lot of its success (and rightfully so). Once we saw behind the curtain it made a little more sense, but when you first dropped into that game it wasn’t clear what the boundaries or consequences were. The matrix wasn’t laid out before you. That’s the key.