Increasingly, games are forgetting when to shut up. Sometimes it’s the characters within the world offering help you don’t need (a feature many players expressed frustration with in last year's God of War Ragnarok). Or it might be that the protagonist and their companions are constantly joking, offering up quips so frequently that it becomes hard to take the world around them seriously. Both offenses have a similar effect of breaking your sense of immersion with the world.
Forspoken got a ton of criticism for its dialogue earlier this year, as clips from the isekai game got shared around Twitter. Frey, a young New Yorker who was suddenly transported to the magical world of Athia, got dunked on mercilessly for her propensity for quippy arguments with the talking cuff on her wrist. Though it didn't get quite as much attention, most criticisms of High On Life (at least the ones that weren't centered on the alleged crimes of Squanch Games' founder, Justin Roiland) focused on how incessant the jokey dialogue emanating from the player’s guns was. In both games, the central character, a talking item on their person, or both, was constantly quipping.
Marvel's forays into video games over the past five years have largely had similar issues. In Spider-Man, Peter Parker cracks jokes nonstop — which is perfectly in character, but the quips just weren't all that funny. Guardians of the Galaxy had a similar issue. It’s difficult to sustain good joke writing across the length of a game, and even if every joke was a winner, it can still get exhausting.
Marvel's Midnight Suns isn't any less quippy than those games, but the way quips are used is different. In fact, the dynamic in Midnight Suns is the reverse of the dynamic in Forspoken. Rather than your character being a smartass yuckster, the smartass yucksters are all around you. Instead of being a modern person sent into a medieval world, the Hunter is a person who lived hundreds of years prior and has been awakened to share a castle hangout with a bunch of Marvel heroes. As a result, the Hunter isn't ever annoyingly jokey. In fact, the Hunter might be my favorite character in the game because she's stoic and grounded, with hints of warmth or terseness depending on how you play her.
The writing of characters like Peter Parker and Tony Stark can still get a little exhausting, and even characters who are, historically, less quippy like Captain Marvel still talk in a similarly self-reflexive way. But, if you get tired of listening to them, the setting and its original inhabitants offer a more chilled out charm. Iron Man's motormouth may serve up a quip a minute, but the ghost of Agatha Harkness is refreshingly easygoing. She and the Caretaker are both spared from the referential writing that afflicts most of the modern characters.
And, anchoring it all, is the Hunter. While many modern games have their characters joke constantly, the Hunter is refreshingly quiet. She isn't someone who's going to speak unless she has something to say. This gives the game a really solid center. The Hunter is taking the world around her very seriously, which encourages you to do the same.