I picked up Tunic on a whim during a Steam sale three years back. Bounced off it twice. Came back a third time during a slow August, and then tore through the whole thing in four days straight. Tiny team out of Toronto made it — basically one guy in a room, if you actually sit through the credits the way I did.
This keeps happening to me. I stumble onto something a dozen people cobbled together, and it lodges in my skull way longer than the stuff with five hundred names scrolling past and half a billion bucks behind it. So I started asking: why?
Scale is a real thing, and it bites both directions
Here’s the trap big games can’t wriggle out of. Once a budget crosses some invisible line, it starts answering to shareholders and marketing departments and release calendars before it answers to you. And a $300 million project? It cannot afford to be weird. So it sands off the rough bits. Crams the map with icons. Stretches the runtime, because hours are the one number a buyer can glance at on a storefront and compare.