I can think of some obvious examples to start with, but my subtle but insidious nominee is Fable III. Fittingly for a pretentious grifter like Molyneux, the game requires you to raise a specific amount of gold or your kingdom is destroyed and you get a bad ending. The goalposts are moved by the game if you raise money in ways it doesn't approve of, and it is simply impossible to reach the fundraising goal in any way that isn't at least Enlightened Centrist levels of evil, the kind that lanyard-wearing neoliberals giggle about. That's right, you need to be at least this evil or your kingdom is destroyed. So deep and really makes you think about the hard decisions that are made by the ruling class, doesn't it? :zizek:
Dishonored.
Don't get me wrong, I love all the Dishonored games (Death of the Outsider is my favourite), but there is a deeply liberal undercurrent to the series.
Both mainline games are about getting rid of the bad aristocratic tyrant and replacing them with the "good" and "rightful" heir to the throne of Dunwall. The most telling part of this is the conflict between the Abbey of the Everyman and any supernatural covens/gangs like the Bridgemoore witches or Daud's Whalers.
Both the Whalers and the witches have specific complaints within society; the Whalers are comprised of former gang members and disenfranchised labourers radicalised by the inequality in Dunwall, whereas the Bridgemoore witches are a radical feminist movement. Conversely the Abbey of the Everyman is a calvinist cult that carries out brutal crackdowns of anyone perceived to be a witch. Despite this the Abbey of the Everyman is consistently framed as being terrible but still the lesser evil. The Overseers essentially fall into the "woke" liberal defence of policing, "Yeah sure they're bad, torturing and murdering randos and all that. But what are you gonna do if a witch turns up and starts killing people? That's why we need more Overseers and they need to be increasingly militarised."
When Delilah Copperspoon takes control of Dunwall and thus the Empire of the Isles, the Bridgemoore witches begin committing mass murder on the streets because... I don't know they're the baddies.
Time and time again the series shows any attempt to change the status quo resulting in pointless bloodbaths and mindless chaos, a status quo that need I remind you is a combination of Dickensian squalor and the Spanish inquisition.
Any changes that happen for the better, happen within the confines of the system. The miners union is the one group that is shown to be uncomplicatedly good, but even they are ineffective in timelines where the duke owns the mine because the union is only using peaceful protest. A kinda washed down vision of historical labour struggles.
The series is deeply critical of the aristocratic class. Every entry in it depicts them as selfish hedonists who'll bleed a beggar to death if they think it will get them a good high at best, and brutal eugenicists willing to let a disease ravage the population in order to get rid of "undesirables" at worst. But this criticism falls weak when the right answer time and time again is always "replace the bad toffs with good toffs".
The system isn't a problem it's the people, in other words.
I did like how in the second one if you're playing Emily all your allies just relentlessly shit on you for being a privileged, out of touch faildaughter who did nothing but go to parties and do secret parkour for fun whenever the topic of poverty comes up.
My favourite ending for Dishonored 2 is high chaos Corvo.
spoiler
If you refuse to undo the curse that turned Emily into a statue, there's no-one left in line to the throne and most of aristocracy is dead so Corvo just declares himself king instead. If the Duke and his body double is also dead, Corvo just declares himself Duke of Karnaca as well. You just end up with Corvo alone and paranoid having ligma grindseted his way into royalty.
eh, I like dishonored. revenge solves everything.
They're some of my favourite stealth games, don't get me wrong. But the games are consumed by liberal politics.
I need to replay the first one but I played the second one recently and it was pretty oppressively lib. Might just be a personal thing but i can’t fucking stand liberals obsession with the “right monarch” kind of stories. I don’t know anything about dune apart from the new movie, but there’s a bit of that there that irked me as well
Dune's politics are all over the place, I've only read the first book but I doubt anyone's got any time for unpacking whatever is going on with all that.
I promise that isn't what Dune is going for, though it takes a while to make its point.
that's just the vibe i got from the framing of this first movie. but i can definitely tell this was like a small portion of everything. just the first thing that popped in my head since i watched it recently.
spoiler
They tried to do something like the Outsider is a force of revolution. He gives people his power who will overturn unjust systems. Billie gets the mark and then ends up killing him and the implication is that his power is set free or everyone gets it or something like that. Then Deathloop is the world decades in the future after that and it's still ruled by mad scientists and wealthy murderers.
Spoiler for like the first mission of Death of the Outsider.
Billie didn't even get the mark though did she? It's been a while since I played it, but aren't her powers from the fact that she's got some time line fuckery from the possible outcomes of the dust district going on?
Wait, is it actually in the same setting or is that just speculation/easter eggs?
I have nothing to add except that I found Daud to be a more interesting and fun protagonist than Corvo.
"You could float a whaling ship on the highborn blood I've spilled."
Uncritical support.