You are not obligated to play any video game. This is a foundational element of what I was trying to get at in my last post. If you play a game, and criticize it for achiveing what it set out to accomplish, you're probably a fool (with exceptions, maybe you find its goals repugnant and that's OK). Pathologic 2 is a good example of this. Critics largely panned the game for being obtuse, difficult, and depressing, but these were all intentional elements, and thematically necessary.
Critics actually ARE obligated to play games, but their response to Pathologic 2 and other games of its ilk demonstrate that most game critics aren't actual critics, they're fans and reactionaries, capable only of shallow comparison. When faced with a work that challenged them, they rejected it instead of opening up to it. Put another way, game critics don't like video games (as a medium for artistic expression), they like a handful of individual video games. This phenomena is absolutely not unique to video games, and criticism (in the sense of critical analysis, not just mean-spirited dunking) in general is devalued in our culture (read: anti-intellectualism).
That being said, gaming is particularly bereft of legitimate critics, at least popular ones. If you've studied film you will have heard of cahiers du cinema, Pauline Kael, Maya Deren, Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, Laura Mulvey etc. Why is it that gaming seemingly doesn't have names like this? It may be that gaming's critics exist in unofficial spaces (youtube and blogs and whatnot) and as such aren't lent the legitimacy necessary for the wider gaming culture to take them seriously.
I am unsure if this is a good or bad thing. Despite the litany of legitimized critics the world of film has/had, popular cinema still exists primarily to entertain and ultimately make money, but history has at least remembered boundary pushing films (Soviet montage, Italian Neorealism, French New Wave, German Expressionism, etc). The critical canon of gaming is made up exclusively of games which exist only to entertain, but then again is an established canon more important or limiting? Idk, I'm talking about big-brain issues even though I am a small-brain guy.
To clarify, I'm not against entertainment, a majority of my favorite movies are at the very least a little fun to watch, but it mustn't be the only goal.