I agree, a trailer should focus on emotional reaction, not a simple display of features or quirkiness (1400 puzzles,10 years of dev). Besides, the voices and writing are generic and maybe even AI generated. The witness had a really good promotion canpaign beautiful and intriguing.
> not a simple display of features or quirkiness (1400 puzzles, 10 years of dev)
I think a 'number of features' metric can work but only for players that already know and like your game, where an expansion with 'Five exciting new areas' is understood as something that they'd enjoy, and I agree it feels odd for a new IP.
Similarly, saying how many years it took isn't remotely a selling point for a new player. If you'd been following the development process then you probably wouldn't care, and if you hadn't you also probably wouldn't care.
It does seem awkward to have to design a trailer for a pure puzzle game, something that essentially relies on things going on inside a player's mind for fun, which by definition won't be visible.
Baba Is You did have something you can show potential players, but I'm not sure there's a trailer that could convey The Witness' 'Oh, I wonder if I can...' moment as it's a very internal experience that comes from playing enough to get to that point.
The Witness was, however, visually beautiful (IMO) and its symbol-based language let the trailer keep an element of mystery and intrigue. Order of the Sinking Star, while potentially also a fantastic puzzle game, seems to not be able to hide anything by nature of it being very clearly a Sokoban-like. Even if there are as-yet-unseen depths to how it treats the Sokoban format, the trailer needs something to work with, and while I think it also looks lovely it perhaps doesn't have the The Witness visual appeal or mystery to draw people in.
Blow falls into a classic engineering mistake of marketing the challenge or effort to make something (audio logs everywhere) and not the end experience.
Note that when masters like Steve Jobs do it, they mention it very quickly, or they mention the ideals of craftsmen ship, rather than the actual process.
Essentially Braid Anniversary edition. Huge effort for someone to just say “oh so just Braid Remastered?”
In general from his streams you learn that so much goes wrong during the slog that is video game development. Hire failures. Contractors billing $$$ and writing 1-2 LOC. Devs rage quitting. Platform optimization. Even a suicide (not just an employee but someone close). They do all this work and dropped the ball on marketing despite betting the future of the company on its reception, but even failing that I think it was clear to a normal person (which can be hard to reach out to and interact with) that there was no appetite for this game.
