Like, I can be passionate about my hobbies. I homebrew beer a lot but slapping beer on a cake would feel so childish. I follow the Scottish national rugby team, and would feel lame af putting their logo on my birthday cake, doubly so since I'm not Scottish and don't live in Scotland. I dabble in Linux but would die of cringe if I made a cake with some distro logo on it. I have some thoughts on political systems but it wouldn't even occur to me to put their symbols on my birthday cake. I also simply wouldn't want to make my birthday all about one niche interest.
Agree completely - although, as a die hard Dunfermline fan, when a friend made me a surprise East End Park cake, I was childishly delighted! 😁
The thing with the ghosts, reminds me a little of Horizon Zero Dawn - there it's not literal ghosts but recordings/writings of people from around the time of the calamity which befell earth. Some of them involved in the events, some of them just passive observers of what was happening. I found it a very evocative way to flesh out the backstory as the game went along.
There was a UK quiz show called Mastermind (it may even still be going, I'm not sure), so it may have been trying to ape the aesthetic of that.
Unlike more quiz shows, Mastermind was presented in a fairly serious tone, contestants sat alone on a black leather chair answering 2 minutes of quick fire questions on their chosen specialist subject, under intense spotlights, somewhat similar to the trope of interrogation techniques with the light being shone directly in the face.
Although this board game really had no similarities in content to the show, they could well have been trying to gain some of the show's mystique (for want of a better term) by making it look quite serious.
Yeah, but Shrek's Scottish accent is horrible.