I think there are a lot of contributing factors here.

I don't like making broad generalizations, but as a whole, most game journalists don't seem to be particularly good at games.

As a result, most game journalists seem to favor games which constantly reward the player, rather than games which challenge them.

Shadow of Mordor seems like the perfect example of a game that is specifically targetting that kind of person; the person that wants to feel like a bad-ass without having to put in any effort.

It started with games like God of War, and more recently, series' like Assassin's Creed where they introduced gameplay mechanics so that the game itself does most of the "work" for your character, while requiring a minimum amount of input from the player.

You just hold down a run button or a climb button, pick a direction, and your character will figure things out, rather than running forwards and having to hit the jump button to hop over obstacles for example.

The core gameplay in Shadow of Mordor is maybe a 5 minute loop which basically plays out the same way every time. There are maybe a handful of different mission types in total, and some side-quests (hunting animals, collecting herbs, climbing towers) to keep the player engaged if they want to take a break from the main missions. Every so often a "nemesis" (one of the enemies you have previously defeated, or been killed by) shows up. And no matter what you're doing, if you just want to go and kill a bunch of orcs, you're gaining experience and collecting runes.

So I understand why some people enjoy games like SoM, but games like that are so incredibly boring to me. It just feels like my brain switches off when I play them, and it seems like a complete waste of my time.

I picked up SoM over the Xmas break due to it winning all those game of the year awards, and I was bored to death with it, within an hour or so of gameplay. Even after that short amount of time, you've basically seen everything the game has to offer.

I forced myself to keep playing until I got to the second area in the game, and at that point I just uninstalled it, because it was another small map which had you repeating exactly the same things over and over again, as you were doing in the first one. The only thing that changed is that you were now doing them in a lush green environment rather than a dull brown one.

And this seems to be an endemic problem with modern games design. The games are designed around a short gameplay loop in an open world, and just try to keep the player engaged in doing that for as long as possible—and the way they often do that is by giving them bars to keep filling up, or loot to collect.

A lot of games these days feel as though they are trying to fuel an addiction, rather than simply being fun for the sake of it.

Look at the number of people that bought and continued to play AAA stuff like Destiny. Everyone I know that is still playing that game doesn't like it.

They don't like the game, yet they felt compelled to play it for literally hundreds of hours.

It's insiduous, and it seems like very few people in the gaming media are consciously aware of it at all.

As for Alien: Isolation, it did not seem to be a big hit with the mainstream crowd because it doesn't hold your hand the way that a lot of modern games do, and doesn't make you feel overpowered all the time.

Now if you go back and compare it to older games like System Shock, it's certainly a lot more simplified, and there are things like always having an arrow telling you where to go, but relative to modern games, it's a "complex" game.

And it's difficult. You can't save wherever and whenever you want, you have to get to a manual save station. You don't get checkpoints every 30 seconds.

If the alien gets to you, you're dead. No QTE mini-games to escape the alien's clutches and get away.

So you could potentially lose 20-30 minutes of progress if you aren't careful.

But—and I feel that this is key—you can learn from your mistakes. Even if you die, you should now have a better idea of what your current environment is like, where the alien is likely to show up, what you can do to avoid it if it's alerted etc.

So while you may not have progressed further into the game itself, you as the player are still making forward progress by learning from that experience.

People seem so used to the way that modern games hold their hands so much and reset "alert states" for the enemies after 30 seconds, that they apparently spent half their time hiding in lockers waiting for enemies to "reset", despite being in these open-ended environments with all sorts of options available to them. (alternate paths, rooms with multiple exits, vents to traverse between rooms, multiple hiding spots etc.)

The default reaction for a lot of players once an enemy has seen them seems to have been "hide in one spot and hope they don't find you".

Or worse: "If you're crouching, enemies can't see you".

Even when they see that an enemy is actually searching all the possible hiding spots in a room, they will continue to hide in a locker for five minutes and complain when that enemy eventually gets to the one they were hiding in and finds them, rather than looking for an opportunity to escape.

The game was about avoidance, not about hiding.

I feel like people who were playing PC games back in the '90s would appreciate Alien: Isolation a lot more than people who spend all their time with modern games for a sense of empowerment.

And yes, it may not have been without real issues, but I really enjoyed playing through Alien: Isolation. It was definitely one of my favorite games from last year.