Headlessness

A: What did you think of Lost Cities?
F: Garbage. A waste of time. Avoid like a reversing skunk.
A: Wow. That's sniping criticism, it must have made quite an impression.
F: Oh yes.
A: How long before you reached this conclusion?
F: 16 seconds.
A: Only 16 seconds of play time?
F: Well, no. Most of that was menu navigation. I probably played for about 5 seconds.
A: I doubt you can thoroughly critique a game in such a timeframe.
F: Good point, but why should I have to? When games compete with books, films, tequila and the great outdoors for a share of my attention, why would I spend time on a game with suck lacklustre visual design?
A: But the graphics have been widely praised in other reviews.
F: The artwork is fine, but the whole is lesser than the some of its parts.
A: And is that all you went by? The visual design?
F: No. I couldn't suss out the rules.
A: In 5 seconds...
F: In 5 seconds.
A: Isn't there a tutorial?
F: Tutorial schmutorial. Good game design makes this redundant.
A: In an FPS maybe, but in a card game adaptation? And what about Carcassonne and Catan?
F: They had better visual design.
A: The rules, how did you work those games out? They're fairly complicated.
F: I admit I lost heavily on my first few goes, but I was enjoying learning the rules whilst playing the game, I didn't need the tutorials.
A: And with Lost Cities?
F: ...
A: The visual design?
F: The visual design.
A: *sigh*
F: And sound.