The Ma๊chine was a metaphor for a "think tank", that troupe you constantly see in TV shows(Barry, for example) about teams of writers called in to help fix up scripts for TV shows and movies, and they are really there to please some marketing team or round table of shareholders.

Like "Instead of us being able to create our own works, 'The Machine' is using us for our ideas to mass print generic things", but it's the only way these "failed" writers can geꦉt by and make money.

"Give us your ideas and we'll make our 'close enough' hollywood spin", "It's like Twilight but instead of Vampires it's Frankenstein's", "Leeching your creativity to make produꦬcts".

The writing of Zoe and Mio IS very bad, and 100% the "Men writing women" type iཧssue.

Mio and Zoe were written hamfisted and childishly, but you missed a♛ lot the game got right.

Like you praise Stephen King for creatiဣve twists on previously written stories but failed to see this game do the same with videogame mechanics, e𝔍ven insulting it's reference to them.

Almost every mechani🐬cꦬ or puzzle in this game is straight out of another game (maybe 100% of them were in Mario Odyssey), but they did a great job with all of them, and added co-op to them also.

You seem to be annoyed or offput by entirely the wrong things, and opening the article with excitement about the game feeling like a "birthday gift from Joseph Fares♚" feels disingenuous since you are mostly complaining about the campy 🐓writing he is famous for.

Joseph Fares writes cringe, and he isn't th𒁏e best at making characters feel unique or well thought out, but he is consistent, and he does m🍬ake good videogames.

Play A Way Out, and if you already have, go play it again, y𝔍ou'll see the same level of cringey teeth gritting writing for the two main characters in that.

The games message is about creativity being the most important thing, and if you 💯don't FEEL🙈 the creativity put into the gameplay, world, puzzles, mechanics, level design... I dunno... Try?