All of your points regarding the video is pretty much my feelings as well.
Originally Posted by Ametris
So, what is romance?
Google says: "Romance or romantic love is a feeling of love for, or a strong attraction towards another person, and the courtship behaviors undertaken by an individual to express those overall feelings and resultant emotions. Romance is also the feeling of comfort and pleasure you experience in a relationship with someone you love."
What makes a romance?
Definition: "Two basic elements comprise every romance novel: a central love story and an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending."
We did briefly mention games that give bad feelings in another thread, but now that you mention it I can not either come up with a game where my PC has been abused by an NPC. Games with partner abuse in them that I can think of is Layers of fear and PT. I personally don't mind a new perspective on things as long as it's a good story, but I have to say playing Layers of Fear once was enough for me. It's extremely depressing. You can also notice that games like that is under the "Horror" genre and not the "Romance" genre.
Edit: Also a game that uses tabu and controversial topics is The Cat Lady, but the story is so well done in that one that for me made it worth going through all the dread and bad feelings. It also has partner abuse, but only in a cutscene and not as a repeatable action triggered by the player. I think that someone wanting to dwelve into such topics in a game or story has to be very good at writing with a deep emotional understanding of the human psychology to hit the perfect balance of good vs bad feelings. It's very easy to make it unplayable. The Cat Lady is also a horror game by the way.
