Tear Jerker / Zero Punctuation

• During his Spec Ops: The Line review, Yahtzee finds himself seriously thinking about what message this game sends. It must be seen to be believed, that he's honestly surprised by the game and the things it makes you do, and how it actually affected him. This is best shown in how he regrets using white phosphorus after finding out it murdered civilians, including children, which he himself is no fan of. It was that disturbing, even to Yahtzee.
  • His voice in the beginning perfectly sets the tone of the review; rather than launching himself into his usual loud, obnoxious rapid-fire wit, he sounds somber and even sad. And no, the farting noises do not make us feel any better, Yahtzee.
    Yahtzee: *sigh* Do you remember when shooters were about killing demons from hell? Those were good days.
• His review of Duke Nukem Forever (for real this time) verges into this territory. You can just tell that when he expects a more mature kind of Duke Nukem game, one where Duke is forced to learn that his actions have consequences, in a way growing up, that he was almost certainly grasping at straws, hoping that it would be good. For the rest of the review, though, he knowingly tried and failed to like the game, to find at least some small level of pleasure as he played it, while aware he was failing miserably at that and eventually admitting that he's "pushed games off subway platforms when they had less flaws than this!". Summed up in one sentence:
  Yahtzee: I guess I want it to be good 'cause that's how the story is supposed to end.
  • It becomes more poignant in that his Let's Drown Out... of Duke Nukem Forever, he revealed that he'd been asked to write a script for Forever, and he came up with one that examined the character — and got rejected because the developer stated that they didn't want to make commentary on Duke or even have jokes about him, just everything going on around him because Duke had to be perfect and unchanged.
  • The last line in the credits sequence:
    Of course it was going to disappoint, I just didn't think it would be this much.
• He gets a small one at the end of his Silent Hill: Downpour review where he admits that constantly comparing the new Silent Hill games to Silent Hill 2 gave him no satisfaction and actually made him a little depressed.
• The second half of the Extra Punctuation column on Kid Icarus: Uprising has him address yet another round of vitriol from Nintendo fanboys. But unlike the Mailbag Showdown, where he was his usual snarky self, his writing comes across as genuinely tired, frustrated and fed up. For all that he tries to seem aloof to the worst of the fanbase, the accusations of anti-Nintendo bias really do upset him and having to deal with the bile time and time again drains him a lot more than he lets on. The last paragraph in particular reads somewhere between an angry shout and a desperate plea:
  "So can we please drop this infantile, butthurt, meaningless fucking argument that I’ve got an irrational personal grudge against a company whose games you’ll note it has somehow never occurred to me to just stop buying if I hate them so much. Why is this argument only ever used against me? I’ve never heard anyone say “Oh, Nintendo brought out another shit game. They must have some kind of automatic bias against Yahtzee Croshaw.”"
• His comparison of the Metal Gear franchise to Lennie in his "Ground Zeroes" review. While he uses this to explain that he can't bring himself to hate it for its shortcomings and occasional screw-ups (since they are not done out of malice), the comparison ultimately gives away his thoughts on the game right off the bat.
  Yahtzee: Did I ever tell you about the rabbits, Metal Gear?
  Metal Gear: Are they down that shotgun barrel?
  Yahtzee: Why yes, Metal Gear. Have a closer look.
• From his Extra Punctuation article on Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor:
  "The Warchief died at my hands, and one of his brainwashed bodyguards took his place. Not Khosh, though. Khosh lay dead, killed by one of the rogue captains, although he'd been able to reduce the guy's health enough that avenging his death was little more than a trivial moment of cleanup in the battle's aftermath. But I was genuinely sad. Khosh was dead, having sacrificed himself to keep a difficult opponent occupied so that I could concentrate on the main target. Was this truly the same orc who'd fled blubbering from a duel, moments before I'd taken him under my wing? He'd had a true arc with a heroic end, leaving aside that whole 'forcibly rewriting his free will' business... Talion doesn't get much more than the usual "NOW WE CONTINUE THE FIGHT FOREVERMORE" weak-ass conclusion to send him off with. But I couldn't have given less of a shit, because there was a new star in the sky that night. A little sweaty green one that drank too much."
• Similarly, his review of Doki Doki Literature Club! has this line.
  Yahtzee: The turning point is when the depressed girl commits suicide. That's the definite point of bollock descent into icy water, although her depression had been portrayed with a slightly uncomfortable authenticity so it wasn't creepy in an enjoyable psychological horror kind of way, it was just really fucking sad. (Imp playing "Hurt" by Nine Inch Nails) It happens regardless of what choices you pick, which, in itself, might be an effective premise for a game about depression: constantly reliving the same few days trying to save her and failing every time because her problems are too deep-seated to be fixed just because you accidentally felt her up on day 3.
• Towards the end of his Hunt Down the Freeman review, Yahtzee launches into a long rant on the state of present-day video games, and by the end of it he sounds genuinely disheartened and sad. Then as a joke, he decides to blame it all on John Romero.
  Yahtzee: Twenty years ago, Half-Life was a focal point in gaming's ongoing development as an artistic narrative medium; the next few years saw a slew of titles that combined AAA game design with genuine emotional story. But what happened between then and now?! Why are the games routinely rewarded with AAA status and income exclusively loot box-infested live service bullshit, games designed not to inspire or stimulate our emotions, but to numb them and hypnotize us into lab rats, mindlessly pawing the button that makes treats come out, while the games created with love and artistic integrity drown beneath waves of bottom-feeders like Hunt Down the Freeman, that tear chunks of rotten flesh from the corpses of Valve's children as Valve itself, once-habitual founders of new ages of narrative gaming, merely waves them on, barely glancing up from their tax paperwork?! What happened to you?! What happened to us?! To the people we were supposed to become?!
• A similar speech appears in Yahtzee's 2018 video on E3. Yahtzee was upset enough at the state of videogames of this era that not only was practically the entire video about how AAA games seem to be about dulling senses and skinner boxing, but the end sequence of the video had an abnormally long, cut off paragraph of text continuing the thoughts that were present throughout the whole video, which went further in-depth.
• At the very beginning of his review of Red Dead Redemption 2, Yahtzee says he has managed to get through the story, and he was quite shook by the game's ending in which the protagonist, Arthur Morgan, succumbs to tuberculosis, which was "possibly the emotional impact, more likely from delirium tremens." And then the Mood Whiplash happens:
  Saturday afternoon, I was like, "Oh boy! I finally reached the epilogue! Maybe I'll actually have Sunday free to relax on!" Eight hours of additional story later, "Fuck me, my definitions are out of date! I had no idea that 'epilogue' now means 'entire second game'!"
• While not explicitly stated, it is clear that Croshaw really wanted to like the sequel of The Last of Us. Considering that he didn't like the predecessor, it's not hard to see why he would be willing to give it a second chance. However, with all the controversies happening regarding the game, he felt he had to rip it a new one. The voice really tells the viewers that he is regretful of his decisions and further dividing the already-fractured fanbase of The Last of Us.
• Croshaw's Stadia review ends with a wistful post-credits comment: "The sad thing is it's probably only Google and NASA who could have the technology to even attempt this shit and it's still not that great."
• Throughout most of Yahtzee's reviews around the late 2010s, he would use an image of Pepper (his old dog) whenever he could. The last use of this image was on a tombstone for his Top 5 of 2020 when describing Spiritfarer, considering Pepper had passed away in November of that year.
  • Speaking of which, when describing Spiritfarer, he admits that he cried upon having to send Alice — the grandmotherly hedgehog who gradually suffers through Alzheimer's who briefly remembers the character before the dementia returns — into the Everdoor. How much so? Said quote is on the tear jerker page of Spiritfarer itself.
• His summation of Return To Monkey Island feels like a depressing Broken Pedestal moment in regards to the Monkey Island series' creators.
  Yahtzee: Not that [the ending] is as 1/16th-bottomed as everything else; they're clearly making a statement with it. It's just that I interpret that statement as follows: "Oh, have you actually invested mental energy into all these intrigues and relationships you've spent the last few hours building up, and are expecting a payoff to all of that? Pah! Talk about missing the point! What a sad lame-o you must be! The end!" And just to grind the heel in a bit, there's a personal message from the creators: "Aw, when you think about it, Monkey Island 1 was about a wide-eyed naif discovering themselves, Monkey Island 2 was about trying to recreate a success that the wide world didn't care that much about. Haven't these games always been about where we were as creators?" Oh, okay. So you're saying the final message of Return to Monkey Island is, "We've stopped giving a shit, and so should you." Message received! How about next time you just tweet that and not charge me 20 bucks?!
• The Extra Punctuation video, "Dark Souls is the Ultimate Game of All Time?", has Yahtzee candidly confess to some of his darker thoughts and fears concerning the state of video games as an industry and art form - and, indeed, society as a whole. As a man who champions games as art, he fears that not only has the concept of auteurism died in today's era of AAA design-by-committee practices, but that to move the industry away from such practices would require massive societal reform that, he worries, is no longer possible, since the systems that allow the big corporations to continue their anti-consumer practices are far too entrenched. At this point, in his mind, it's already too late to stop said systems from dragging society into inevitable collapse and apocalypse, and by then video games won't even matter.
  Yahtzee: These are the dark thoughts that nag me and make me worry that gaming has already peaked. But what do you think, commenters? Maybe you think I’m wrong. Let us know because oh, lordy, would I very much like to be wrong!
• The episode about the Corrupted Blood Incident from World of Warcraft has two points that really highlight how it reflected humanity at its best and worst at once.
  • While the incident itself was going on, some players began to organise cordons to warn other players to stay out of the in-game cities to prevent the spread of the virus, while healers coordinated to keep people alive and high level players who could tank the debuff tried to get a handle on things in the cities. But their efforts were largely undone by rubberneckers who were carelessly logging in to see all the Gorn caused by the spread of the virus and the Trolls who loved the pain the other players were going through and became determined to keep it going at all costs until Blizzard were forced to hard reset the servers and patch the dungeon that caused the debuff.
  • After describing the event itself, Yahtzee talks about how the incident caused academics to take an interest in whether it might be applicable to real life pandemics, especially sociologically. But others argued that no, it wasn't because people would have to be massive idiots to blow off official quarantine orders or deliberately spread a disease around. Then many years later, the COVID-19 Pandemic happened, and it turned out that no, really, people were genuinely stupid and reckless enough to do all that and more, as humanity lived down to all of the worst behaviour exhibited in the incident. Yahtzee remarks that this is less a joke at the expense of the game industry than the entire human race.
• On November 6th, 2023, Yahtzee resigned from The Escapist after Nick Calandra was fired by their corporate owners, The Gamurs Group. Yahtzee didn't fancy being the only viable series on the site again, so he left in solidarity to join Second Wind. On the one hand, it's more than admirable that Yahtzee stuck by his team, and even more admirable that he's still producing reviews how he sees fit. Other hand, it's sad that Zero Punctuation is over, since he doesn't own the IP and couldn't take it with him. Decades of work, and it didn't even get a proper sign-off.

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