lore through collectibles is the greentext of videogame writing
there are so many problems with this kind of exposition. it's lazy, it's excessive, it's formulaic, it stretches your suspension of disbelief even further ("oh no a zombie outbreak, better record my thoughts on the matter and leave the 1980s ass voice recorder with the tape in it for any protagonists venturing through this lab later" - Dr Exposition).
there's also the importance paradox: if the content of your collectibles is important to the story, why are you holding it hostage until the player performs some arbitrary busywork? if it isn't, why does it even need to be told in the first place?
a good story isn't one where there's nothing more to add, it's one where there's nothing left to remove. excerpts from the cutting room floor shouldn't be smuggled into the game under the pretense of "fleshing the world out", all it does is dilute the tightness of your script.^(1)
then there's all the damage it does to the gameplay. it completely destroys the pacing of the game.^(2) just like everything else designed around FOMO and dopamine chains, it sucks the enjoyment out of the game if you choose to engage it with it. collectible hunting also basically breaks exploration as it was intended: you are never taking the environments in, you never have any sense of wonder, your brain just scans every new room for hotspots and only parses the surroundings on a superficial, pragmatic level.
fuck story through collectibles.
^(1) to avoid any confusion: obviously, this doesn't apply to a certain kind of game - your elder scrolls, your baldur's gates, your kingdom comes. it does, however, abso-fuckin-lutely apply to what's supposed to be tight narrative experiences like alan wake, doom, until dawn, dishonored...
^(2) "but you don't have to read them as you pick them up, you can just do it later!" - yeah, and lose all context and all connections in between the different pieces. there's no winning with this shit
