So, for people who have not heard of it before, the basic pitch is Papers, Please + FMV games + FNaF. You play as a TV news producer in definetly not 80's Britain, during the ascension of a radical party (which BTW are left leaning, but with no mention of socialism or any of the associated iconography anywhere, kind of weird), and the story branches depending on what you choose to show/censor. The tone is mostly parodic and cartoonish in nature.
Disregarding the political commentary for a second, the game's humor varies from cringe to somewhat funny, the story and characters are pretty entertaining, but the game could benefit from cutting some of the fat (specially those awful music segments). If that seems interesting I'd say give it a try. Fair warning: it's an FMV game so it will take a lot of space on the hard drive.
By this description alone most of you are probably rolling your eyes and those instincts are mostly correct, the game very often devolves into :1984: tier commentary (the protagonist's surname is Winston for god's sake). But sometimes it's weirdly sympathetic to the supposedly authoritarian government, in a kind of grounded way?? I was expecting BioShock Infinite centrism or worse, but instead I got complete tonal whiplash.
basically spoiling the whole game
For example, shortly after introducing a wealth redistribution plan, the country is immediately sanctioned into oblivion, despite the worst thing done at this point being taking rich people's passports away. In one moment, an organization is basically portrayed as the Hitler youth and in the next it's pointed out how some parents are just salty they don't have absolute authority over their kids anymore, and how pervasive abuse used to be.
Even after the government turns into a cartoon villain by nuking a bunch of countries and taking their territory, plus accidentaly sterilizing most of the population, a teenage character will still deliver a seemingly genuine speech about how much the foster care system improved after the party took over.
I basically got the enlightened centrist ending but even in this one the resistance movement, which to this point was portrayed as a grassroots vaguely chud adjacent guerilla is revealed to be entirely manufactured by :epstein: types and foreign powers. So even in this case the centrism is not really a return to the status quo, since that would mean capitulating to :porky-happy: .
It's weird in a way I can't quite articulate, like if the South Park guys wrote the script and then someone edited in stuff that actually makes sense just to annoy me. It doesn't even feel like the Killmonger thing of having a villain that has a point kick a dog or something. It's just weird.
Am I wasting brain space for obvious :LIB: shit? Yes, but I do think I discovered a unique flavor of :brainworms: in the wild. Does anyone have more examples of this particular type of incoherent ideology in media?
A smarter version of this game would be implicitly be about saying all these contradictions are True-ish but you get to shape how people feel somewhat by choosing what to censor or air.
A good mechanic would be feeding too much Good News it makes people distrustful because you don’t have any of the painful reality people on the ground feel.