Anyone have any favorite subversive/leftist games? There used to be a great one about the apple supply line where you had to move the nets to catch the guys jumping out of the factory in china and throw the e waste in a dumpster fire in pakistan. Banned from the app store of course lmao.

  • edwardligma [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    apart from the obvious disco elysium,

    cloudpunk is really great, the gameplay itself is pretty simplistic and repetitive (you may consider it meditative or boring as hell) but the story and characters are fantastic, and its actually quite a positive story of carving out little oases of meaning and hope in even the most dystopian hypercapitalist hellscape. leftist cyberpunk in all the ways that cyberpunk 2077 isnt

    frostpunk is bleak and tough but fantastic but not particularly leftist, but the 'last autumn' dlc is all about class relations and you can go hard into taking the workers/union side

    the tropico series has one joke it milks to death which is "haha fidel corrupt dictator", but if you can get past that its actually a fairly materialist citybuilder and also with cuban aesthetics (and music). the reason i add it here is that most management/strategy games have a primary meta-goal of building up the power/prestige/wealth/territory of the nation or whatever as their primary goal with happiness mostly just to stave off rebellion, this is one of the only ones where the main meta-goal is actually "make the people as happy as possible by providing for their basic human needs". tropico 6 is the best of the series fwiw (and also the best one for avoiding cars)

    havent played it myself but fursan al aqsa is a game where you play as a palestinian dude mowing down hordes of idf soldiers

    hitman lets you dress up as zoolander and stab ghislaine maxwell to death, and also creatively murder a whole bunch of other bourgeois ghouls

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I enjoyed Tropico when I played it. One of the things I don't like about a lot of 4x games is that very few of them are actually about improving people's lives and tropico does that.

      • ssjmarx [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        You might also like Timberborne, which is in a very polished early access state and is all about guiding post-apocalyptic Beaver civilization. It doesn't really have any goal except increasing your beavers' happiness.

    • UlyssesT [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      leftist cyberpunk in all the ways that cyberpunk 2077 isnt

      "Not all cops are bastards!" - V, the variable-dicked "Legend of Night City" :bootlicker:

      • Coca_Cola_but_Commie [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I think it's fine that you sometimes work with police in 2077, given your role as a solo, but what I hate is there's never any missions where you work against the police. A gang never hires you to, like, steal evidence or intimidate a detective. Ora mission where you have to steal something valuable from a precinct and have to blast through the NCPD on your way out.

        Silverhand is in V's head screaming about smashing the corps, smashing the system, but there's none of that punk ethos in the story. There's like two lines where Silverhand complains that edgerunners in 2077 have sold out to the corps, and in some endings you get to fuck over Arasaka, but that's it. I really liked the game for what it is, but the politics are disappointing.

        • UlyssesT [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          That's exactly my problem. There's a work-together option with fucking cops in a so called cyberpunk game but for some reason the gangs are all just differently texture mapped targets with varying stereotypes.

          And any actual revolutionary ideology is pushed with "going too far" ideological bullshit with Keanu Reeves.

    • ReformOrDDRevolution [comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      but the ‘last autumn’ dlc is all about class relations and you can go hard into taking the workers/union side

      I'll have to check this out, I liked playing the base game when it came out.

      • ssjmarx [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        About half are, but i get the feeling the other half are alt right weirdos.