What are the most Marxist or at communist-friendly games?
All I know are
Marxist or AES-Positive
- Disco Elysium
- Atom RPG
- Civilization 1-4
- Metro Exodus
- Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic
- Red Faction Guerilla
Anti-Capitalist
- Pathologic 2
- Red-Dead Redemption 2
- Fallout New Vegas
- Hitman
Potentially Based
- 35mm (Sergey Noskov, Sometimes You)
- In the Rays of Light (Sergey Noskov, Sometimes You)
- Frost Punk
Kor is good, buy Kor.
It was made by a leftist and has some anti-capitalist moments
I'm still amazed that so many people played Disco Elysium, even on /v/. I need to play it but I don't think it will run on a Thinkpad T430.
- Have a T430
- Have Disco Elysium
- Became a Big Communism Builder
They released a patch a while back that drastically lowered system requirements.
You know you say Disco Elysium and what I've liked about its portrayal is how fair it is, which is extremely rare and shows the creators know what they're talking about. You meet multiple groups of communists and all of them are coming at it from different angles, because it's set in the aftermath of a failed revolution. The protagonist himself comes off as hilariously naive, because he's some amnesiac cop wearing disco pants who lost his mind and genuinely out of nowhere decided he was a revolutionary. The decision gives him an inflated sense of self-worth and earns him the respect of basically nobody. The other few I can think of are the union leader, who is doing things like real estate scams and covering up murders. There are the students who run a leftist club, but they're largely inert scholars who meet in a dilapidated apartment talking high minded theory and not organizing. There's the final antagonist, who has absolutely lost his mind and is trying to rekindle a movement that died decades ago. All of the characters are trying to deal with the world that's been given to them and come up with their ideological positions from those circumstances. It's neat.
Also a really good game is To Build a Better Mousetrap It's just a short flash game but it gets the point across pretty quickly. It's about managing a factory that builds a thingie. Thingies are sold to generate pellets to feed your workers. You can also research automation to replace workers with robots, but you also have to manage an increasingly belligerent mass of unemployed mouse people. Workers also get mad if they're not paid on time. So you've got to manage a contradiction of increased automation not helping anyone except you, the person in charge.
Hammer & Sickle is a (rather obscure) Russian turn-based squad tactics game (which is basically a third Silent Storm game, despite not having the title or branding, it's weird). It's set in 1949, and you play as a Soviet agent who infiltrates into Allied-occupied Germany and ends up stumbling on a bunch of neo-fascist terrorist plots to start WW3. I posted some spoiler-ific dialogue from it a long time ago.
It doesn't necessarily have any deep theory in it, but it has some good bits. It's one of the few games (and really, pieces of media in general) I know of to actually bring up the fact that a whole bunch of Nazis ended up working for the West after WW2. It also has some pretty based characters - along your possible squad members, you have a Spanish anarchist (who actually fought for the Soviets on the Eastern Front) and a Polish Jew who's become a Nazi hunter specifically because of his disappointment at how little the Allies are actually doing to prosecute the fuckers. Another character is this forester, who has one of the most based lines I've ever heard in a game - when he says he used to help Jews during the war, the protagonist asks him "ah, so you're an anti-fascist", and he responds simply "I'm a human being".
You also get to disable a nuke by shooting at it with a gun and get personally awarded a medal by Stalin in the best ending (off-screen, but still), so that's cool. It can, unfortunately, be a rather difficult and obtuse game at times, there's a bunch of time-sensitive missions in it, but that also leads to another really neat bit about it, which is that the plot is pretty flexible and has branches for you failing stuff. You don't really get a simple "Game Over" screen unless your protagonist dies, the worst you can get is drawing enough attention to yourselves that the US Army hunts you down and you get an unwinnable final fight, but that's rare, normally if you fuck up you simply get the "well, we didn't prevent WW3, so might as fight in it" branch where you get a final (winnable this time) mission to capture some bridge and help a Soviet Armored division cross over into the Allied occupation zone.
The whole Silent Storm series is amazing (the original, the standalone expansion pack Sentinels, and Hammer & Sickle which I count as being part of the series since it literally has the same engine, assets, base gameplay, and even references the plots of the previous ones).
One really cool thing about them is they have very extensive enviromental destruction. It doesn't have a super-detailed physics simulation to it (so you won't see things actually collapse by falling over for example, if the engine runs a calculation and figures out that a particular bit of the level geometry doesn't have anything to stand on, it will just evaporate in a cloud of particle effects instead of falling to the ground), but it's still amazing, and it adds a lot to your tactical flexibility. One of your characters heard an enemy in the other room (which in the game is represented by having a silhouette showing an approximate position)? Well, you can just shoot through the wall. Locked door in your way? Why bother picking it when you can just have your machinegunner unlock it with a belt of 8mm Mauser.
They're also really cool to play if you're a gun nerd, they feature a lot of more obscure WW2-era weaponry, and probably the largest variety of grenade types and explosives I've ever seen (you can literally throw jars of pure nitroglycerin, which is rather ill-advised in real life).
Unfortunately all the physics stuff is really heavy and sometimes, in particularly extreme cases of destruction, the game will just have to sit there for a minute running calculations, and this isn't something that gets fixed by running it on modern hardware (since I'm guessing it only uses one core, although I haven't tested it, but it's from the age before it was clear that multi-core was the direction CPUs would go in, a lot of games from that time have no support for multi-threading).
I’ve no idea if this is any good, or what the story is like but there’s Partisans 1941 which seems to be about hiding in the woods on the Eastern Front and stabbing nazis in the throat.
Barret's a true revolutionary in the original too. He wasn't always one, but he has a rough past with Shinra and his anger at them got redirected towards the revolutionary project when he learned theory at an indigenous commune.
I've heard one of the things lost in the original translations, Barret was a sad Marxist.
Ooh, I've never heard that. I know that FF7 was basically translated by one guy with a spreadsheet and a lot of coke.
I watched a video about it a while ago, a guy who speaks both English and Japanese fluently went through and played it in Japanese and went (more or less) line by line to explain the differences.
He was extremely sympathetic to the guy you mentioned giving him the benefit of the doubt, and pointing out the massive amount of work Square gave him. He surmised the translator wanted to make Barret more "relatable" to Americans by making him an "angry black man" using the only context he had for black men. (Mr. T)
In the Japanese texts they really hammer home that his anger is fueled by sadness and his worldview is even more explicitly leftist (I'm pretty sure he says most certainly Barret is a communist).
Surviving mars sort of.
The main goal is to create a self sufficient colony and free your self of financial dependency on earth.
I love how in 4 the game held Cuba in high regard and basically uses it as the base performance metric you must strive for.
What is anti-capitalist about Pathologic 2? I haven't played it yet but I'm vaguely familiar with it.
Exploitation of workers, uneven affects of industrialization, nuanced portrayal of the unique capitalist hardships of indigenous groups.
Surprised nobody named Tonight We Riot by Pixel Pushers Union 512. The game is a worker's revolution against the state. You patrol along streets bearing red flags throwing molotovs at pigs, and you liberate factories as you go. Since it's a movement and not some individualist fantasy, when the character you control dies you immediately just control some different character in your mob, the movement only dies if everyone in the mob dies.
It's the definition of based. And PPU512 is a worker coop, support your comrades.
