Quote Originally Posted by warty goblin View Post
I think a lot of the dislike for this sort of storytelling is the sense that what's behind the curtain isn't worth the effort of figuring it out. It's not that mysteries are bad, or solving them is unrewarding, it's the sense that the answer isn't itself compelling or thought provoking or genuinely insightful enough to stand on its own. If you have to spend all those hours piecing things together, it seems pretty reasonable to be unsatisfied by finding out that a bunch of uncharacterized entities with names like The Rose Of Sorrow or whatever doing vague things to each other. I'm not against metaphor or symbols on storytelling - far from it - but there needs to be a there there. Otherwise it's just a fancy way of dressing up a story outline as an actual finished story
This is basically hitting the nail on the head. There are loads of reasons to be vague or abstract, lots of moments wherein a story feels good for forcing you to piece together fragments and vagueness and the like. A well-told story that's obscure and full of symbolism and the abstract and hidden meanings can be absolutely delightful. It's just that so often this happens because you're actually dealing with a game that's no more complicated than an old-school Gold Box game and then hiding behind it with the sense of "see, it's all vague and deep and meaningful and you just didn't get it!"

All stories have messages, as I've said elsewhere on this very forum, but that doesn't mean all messages are nuanced and/or complex. And it's perfectly all right to have a simple and straightforward message. Just don't act like your simple story has depth because you refuse to ever tell me what's going on in a comprehensible fashion.