u/lowercaselemming

I'm talking about the kinda stuff, game, show, movie, manga, anime, whatever, that you just have to add qualifiers on top of qualifiers for before you can recommend it, in spite of the fact that you do really love it and enjoy it.

For me, it's The OA, a Netflix show that was underlooked, and I probably wouldn't consider to say it's underrated. It's a good show, a reaaally good show, but you have to look through some very hokey stuff about it, meet it on its level, and be willing to put up with some reaaaally slow character-building while it dangles a massive web of mysteries over your head. Also, it was prematurely cancelled on one of the craziest cliffhangers I've ever seen. It demands a lot from you, but is so worth it.

The characters are amazing, the acting is great, the mysteries are intriguing. Despite its ridiculousness it's a very sincere show that plays the silliest stuff completely seriously. It has an ethereal, dream-like nature to the way it's presented that you just don't really get in any other show. Like the boys would say, it's made for very specific freaks.

This year has been a really sad one for layoffs. It's not even safe for indies.

Blurb:

>OtherSide Entertainment, the developer of Thick as Thieves led by immersive sim veterans Warren Spector and Paul Neurath, has laid off 17 employees and cancelled an upcoming game. 

>In a statement provided to Game Developer, an OtherSide spokesperson confirmed the number of affected employees and said a project codenamed ‘Argos’ had been cancelled. 

>This appears to refer to Argos: Riders on the Storm, which was mentioned in an IGN interview with Spector in November 2022. 

>The game was set to be a multiplayer immersive sim, but was never officially revealed by OtherSide. “The idea is to empower players to create their own experiences and tell their own stories,” Spector said of the game at the time.

>The OtherSide spokesperson told Game Developer that Argos “could have been a huge success in normal times” but said the game was “unviable for now” due to the current industry landscape. 

>The spokesperson also confirmed that the round of layoffs occurred at the end of May 2026. This would mean employees were let go around the same time as the launch of Thick as Thieves, which was released on 20 May 2026. 

>Thick as Thieves was intended to be a multiplayer, PvPvE immersive sim, but a few weeks before launch in April 2026, OtherSide confirmed that it had reworked the game to be single-player and two-player co-op only. It launched at the unexpectedly low price point of US $5. 

>In 2023, OtherSide announced a “strategic partnership” with videogame company Aonic Group. OtherSide said that the partnership “will greatly enhance OtherSide’s ability to continue to grow the studio and deliver original titles that take games to new levels of the studio’s signature ‘player agency’ focus.”

>Aonic’s publishing arm, Megabit, published Thick as Thieves. 

>The scrapping of the Argos project isn’t the first cancellation OtherSide has suffered since it was formed in 2013 by Neurath. 

>In 2015, OtherSide announced it was making System Shock 3. However, Tencent acquired the rights to future System Shock games in 2020. While it initially invested in OtherSide to keep development going, Spector told GamesBeat in 2022 that it had stopped working on the game. 

>In 2022, Hasbro announced it had partnered with OtherSide to make a licensed Dungeons and Dragons game for its subsidiary Wizards of the Coast. In 2023, Bloomberg reported that Wizards of the Coast had cancelled several videogame projects, and that OtherSide was one of the studios affected. 

Getting fired right as the game launched just kinda sucks, damn. Working on video games nowadays has to be so demoralizing.