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.
Obligatory plug: Hexbear now has an annual game jam. This year's theme was the Soviet Union and we got some pretty badass games out of it
I've been having a blast with 2020's Tonight We Riot, from Means Interactive.
Sidescrolling beat 'em up where you play as a literal crowd of anarcho-communist revolutionaries. The crowd copies what you do, and if your main guy happens to die you instantly switch to someone else. Other Marxist principles are literally baked into the gameplay, like when workers are hostile you can kill their managers and they'll join you, but cops can never be rehabilitated.
I remember unlocking endless mode and getting to the point in it where the developers' commentary just went "okay uhhhhhh we don't have anything left to say we did not expect you to actually last this long" haha yes.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Whoa it actually exists. The reviews for Fursan Al-Aqsa are absolutely based tho
About half are, but i get the feeling the other half are alt right weirdos.
I'm loving it so far, but it seems like there's like... absolutely no way to feasibly advance while keeping animal agriculture? I'm genuinely curious, is it impossible to save earth without getting rid of the animal agriculture industry, am I missing something in the game around fuel, or...?
Well, yeah, it's trying to demonstrate that in real life keeping animal ag is uh checks notes the worst thing a modern society could do
It is legitimately the biggest roadblock to a stable climate?
Yeah, genuinely. A good shorthand idea is that every time you source your meal one step up on the "animal kingdom" then you require 10x more calories to have produced that than you ate. For example, if you ate only cows, and those cows ate only corn, then every gram of beef you ate would have required 10 grams of corn. This goes up in scale too, say you ate an alligator, each gram of meat of the alligator required 10 grams of Floridian geese, and every gram of Floridian geese required 10 grams of Floridian grass, meaning every gram of alligator you eat required 100g of grass to be created.
This is why most people don't eat carnivores, because the calories required to keep carnivores alive just to eat is hugely unweildy and impractical, while industrializing the farming of herbivores is temporarily sustainable but long term laughably unsustainable as well. I'm not very good at explaining this but other comrades are.
Ahh yes I've heard that science before. It does make sense in that aspect but it isn't a zero sum game is it? My initial rebuttal is thinking the disappearing mass doesn't just disappear, it goes into the more nutrition-rich and dense meat. I can't help but think barring a way to mass-produce meat (like the game presents) or massive degrowth (like the game presents) the existing means of animal agriculture will need to stay in order to not put undue physical deterioration on many people or on production of plant agriculture. But in any case it would be reduced in accordance with discarding the profit motive driving its current ridiculous production... Which of course is the root issue. But yeah if anyone wants to jump in or you want to clarify? I'm not entirely on board with the rationale for delet'ing animal agriculture purely because of the possibly incorrect "common sense"/chauvinist idea that humans are generally omnivorous and do need meat to feasibly meet the requirements for healthy living (of course this is to mean for the vast majority of people, that is to say you couldn't sustainably create the amount of nutrient rich plant food the entire world would need)
When I was thinking about why it would need to be discarded I was thinking that on top of the need to feed animals, and all the byproducts of keeping and kiling them, there's the whole transport chain side of the equation rife with bizarre "capitalist efficiencies" that save money but cause SO MANY problems. That alone would be a massive emissions and resources factor that would be mitigated and greatly reduced by the removal of privatization and the profit motive.
Yeah but those calories don't all go to the meat, they mostly get discarded and turned to methane or useless waste or other stuff. I'm not an expert, I just know this off the top of my head, I think it'd probably be more productive for you to search and read online
I beat the game with a 50% reduction in meat consumption, with 75% cellular meat and 25% organic farming. I couldn't ban meat completely.
You can—it’s a low hanging fruit, and chipping away at it in various ways is helpful, but you can win without abolishing meat.
I've heard the ending is lib but what I have seen of Hardspace: Shipbreaker is extremely based and pro union.
The ending is pretty much just
spoiler
the union wins some popular support and gets legal concessions from the weak state, forcing the company to the negotiating table when the workers go on strike. Things get a bit better for the union workers and some of the worst problems get stopped, but ultimately the struggle doesn't stop just because of a single strike.
It's actually less idealist and more grounded in what the striking salvage workers could actually accomplish: the gains they make are their own and they don't get more because people settle for less and it was never a revolutionary movement in the first place, just people desperate for even the bare minimum of concessions.
came here to mention this one, I'm still at the beginning, but not only does it have a based and pro-labor message, it's also a really fun game, breaking down the ships is always a fun puzzle
Leftist Slay the Spire? Slay the...Nazi?
Yes I would play many hours of that. You can pick between Marxist, Anarchist, Socialist, Indigenous classes.
The Sniper Elite games allow me to indulge in my true passion: exploding Nazi eyeballs from 500m. It is deeply satisfying. I think there might be a story, but I couldn't even tell you the protag's name.
still feels like a waste that not a single one of those games has you take the role of a red army sniper, particularly when there are so many to choose from
Nazi Zombie Army, the zombie spinoff game, let's you play as various Soviet characters. Also - PPsH go brrrrrt
all i remember is that his name is Karl and he appears in a Zombie shooter set after ww2
Workers and Resources!
Jk
I haven't played either of these but they're on my wishlist:
- Tooth and Tail - can't tell if it's Pro-Revolutionary but a monarch dies so I'm in.
- Root: A Game of Woodland Might and Right - has varying political factions with different governing styles. Started out as a board game but now has a video game version.
Tooth and Tail
feels quite materialistic. There are a few lib elements, but once you finished it you can gloss over them (though it is also slightly reactionary in some way). Also freaking bloody and brutal.
I do recommend it.
Risk of Rain 1 ends the game with a brief pan over each stage you visited- and all of the corpses you left. Turns out the final boss was using the planet as an ark for endangered species from other planets. Oh and the humans were only there to pillage for space Amazon.
And then Risk of Rain 2
muddies the watersembellishes by making a majority of the species planet killers responsible for their own demise- at least in the eye(s?) of 2's new final boss, who is 1's shirtless goth brother- who likes throwing innocent creatures into blackholes, for reasons.They get brownie points for the money-eating chain gun and the item that's just Marie Antoinette's guillotine. Their item descriptions detail a revolution on planet ancap.
caaaaves of qud. it has giant frog commune (as in the frogs are giant, the commune is pretty cosy)
it's a roguelike but you can turn permadeath off so that's fine, one of the key story characters is q-girl, an anarchist theorist/science genious barathumite (sentient porcupine bear), you can get your face dismembered, regrow it, and then wear your severed face on top of your face to get +2 Ego (which improves the power of your psychic attacks), lategame robot enemies include biblically accurate angel + bass pro stores pyramid, those enemies can become friends as, like all factions, you have rep with them that you can improve by killing their enemies or performing the Water Ritual with their friends. maybe I should do a megathread at some point lol
Umurangi Generation, which I haven't played myself, but it seems to be pretty interesting - it's a photography game made by a Maori developer, about a future dystopia under siege by kaiju
Hammer & Sickle, for which I'm just going to copy over a prior post on it
I also recently played through G String, a kind of awkwardly titled cyberpunk FPS. I wasn't expecting anything special when I started it, I just thought the aesthetic looked cool, and then the intro cinematic was literally Martian anti-colonial resistance forces fighting NATO in space. The atmosphere's amazingly evocative - everything's decaying and falling apart, there's trash everywhere (including in space), enviromental destruction has progressed to the point where you basically have to be wearing a hazmat suit at all times. It's kind of jank at times, but it has good moments
Umurangi Generation also has one of the best video game soundtracks I've ever heard. An 80+ track mixtape that mashes up every genre of 80s and 90s dance music.
