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The game that scratches this itch for me is Kenshi. It's basically Fallout, but thousands of years after the apocalypse and set on an alien planet. There are no more bullets, no more vehicles, and very little hope in a bleak hellscape. The visual and musical aesthetic is one unlike anything else I've played: Japanese apocalypse scrap-punk. The massive rusty hulks of fallen starships dot the arid landscape, and people melt down the iron to hammer into blades and armor. Technology from the Old Times is worth more than anything, and tech-hunters search for hidden vaults and laboratories. The wilds teem with weird and deadly beasts that will literally rip your character's limbs off and eat them, forcing you to crawl to safety if you don't bleed to death. One of the biggest factions are sneering aristocrats who enslave the poor, and the other biggest faction are all unhinged religious fundamentalists who hate women and black people. As you could imagine, this shitty world is rife with slavery, and even the player isn't safe.
On the flip side, once you survive the grueling early game, gather and train more people, and learn how to fight, you can turn the tables. I started off as single fugitive in rags who spent every night huddled between some rocks and praying the bandits wouldn't find me. Now I'm 84 different people, all with their own skills and gear. Warriors, workers and explorers. Even built a big-ass base and researched hydroponics- once I lay low the dogmatic dipshits of the self-styled Holy Nation and seize their farmlands, I will use this technology to feed the entire wasteland.
As for the slave traders, I've been terrorizing the fuck out of them, raiding slave markets left and right, killing guards and freeing captives. Some of them run off right away, some join my party. I capture the slaver bosses and bring them back to my town to stand trial. They are invariably found guilty, and executed by crossbow firing squad. 10/10 good times, here are some other cool things that have happened to slavers in my Kenshi game:
-Eaten by pet hounds
-Eaten by pet dinosaur
-Eaten by pet giant crabs
-Dropped off a mountain
-Used as a training dummy, being beaten unconscious and given medical treatment over and over to level up my character's Martial Arts skill
-Just straight up stabbed in combat
-Burned at the stake
-Put in The Peeler
All in all a great game with a lot of things you can do to slavers. Highly, highly recommend.
I'd always pegged Kenshi as a collaborative multiplayer game. Is it actually singleplayer?
Yeah, it's a kind of hybrid RPG/RTS where you can switch control between party members, so you could play as one character on an adventure while others carry out different tasks. Definitely looks mulitplayer, especially once you start sending parties and squads all over the place, but it's just one player running the collective. Like if Mount and Blade had a baby with KOTOR
Yeah, Kenshi is great for what op is looking for. I'm looking forward to playing more of it when I'm less busy.
It's easy for me, but I'm a huge fan of clunky old games, and even though Kenshi isn't old, it really has that feel. If you cant stand playing ancient games you'll probably not be able to get over the feel of Kenshi.
I absolutely love Kenshi. But once I built a fortress in that green fertile valley near the terrifying religious dudes and got strong enough to kick their ass whenever they came knocking, I felt like I had kind of "won." I made a functioning society that wouldn't completely suck to live in. At that point I started sending my main character out with a few close companions to do adventurer shit, but it was, funnily enough, too easy at that point to be very worthwhile.
Get your ass whooped and robbed by bandits. Genuinely the only real way to train your combat early-game. They won't enslave you so you'll prolly be ok.
Once you can actually fight them, then you basically enslave them. As a training dummy, of course. Keep knocking them out and then when they get back up, just do it again before they can run away. You can usually get a lot of use out of one bandit.
This looks dope. I'll check it out next time it goes on sale
It's at less of a personal scale, but in Stellaris if your star nation is any degree of Egalitarian you can launch liberation wars against slaver empires to force them to #bebetter or just straight up conquer their planets and put the slave species in charge.
I get it. Playing as the "good guys" in stellaris has always felt rather flat and uninteresting. Personally I much preferred going in as the obviously evil faction
RDR2 lets you kill KKK members in creative ways.
Assassin's Creed, Freedom Cry is literally you leading a Hatian Slave Revolt in the 1720s and its one of the best installments. I'm a fan of AC:Liberation as well which has a great half black female protagonist.
With what we now know about ubisoft i am amazed that game got made.
also, killing the carnival barking eugenicist is good times. i tied him up and drowned his ass.
also you can free lots of random prisoners/captives and kill their jailers/bounty hunters... and they usually give you a tip on a rich settler to do some home invasion on.
there's that one encounter in down south where you come up on a camp of those former-confederates-now-a-gang, kill 'em all, and see they had taken a city cop hostage, all tied to a post. he was asking me to cut him free, so i lit him on fire so my heart could dance to the music of his screams.
Minecraft, I'm told
e: Morrowind. There's even a secret abolishionist organization you can join
I hear there's this game called Outside where you could totally give this a try.
in chapochat, /c/Outside is a sub about leaving the spectacle of society and literally going outside
leaving the spectacle of society and literally going outside
Sounds nice, tbh.
Kenshi has an anti-slaver faction that you help out by hunting down slave owners and traders. I think you need to kill a slave owning noble to even join the faction in the first place.
Am i the only one who feels anxious playing games like that one because i'm constantly afraid i'm closing possible paths and optional routes/missions?
Think of it this way, not killing them is closing the "kill them immediately" path.
I'm there with you. I think the solution might be going in planning to play through a few times.
The game doesn't focus around it but I had a lot of fun killing absolutely everyone without a collar on slaver island in Pillars of Eternity 2: deadfire. Stellaris and the other Paradox grand strategy games deserve a shout. You can do fun lefty wars of liberation against nations who's politics you don't like and enact policies that make your people's lives not suck.
Not exactly what you're looking for but Wolfenstein is all about killing Nazis
there's a series of random open map missions in RDR2 where you get to kill KKK dipshits. it's awesome and there's like a whole little story with letters and items you can get from them. also there's lots of killing of slave owners and cops if you want to.... one of my favorite things in online is just starting shit with cops, riding around and killing them and drinking moonshine to get my health back up. y'know living vicariously
The slavers are a lot more of a prominent faction in Fallout 3. I had a grand old time kicking down the front door of Paradise falls and killing every slaver with Lincoln's repeater
In The Sinking City, based in the 20’s and an adaptation of the Cthulhu mythos, you can enjoy shooting the KKK. Not technically slave-owners, but still as much fun to shoot.
There is an isometric/turn-based-combat RPG inspired by Fallout 1/2, called "ATOM RPG" - it's basically Fallout, but in the USSR. Slavers aren't a major faction and they mostly operate in secret (or are roving bands in the wasteland), but there's a number of quests tied to them if you can find them. I had a blast after getting a list of their clients (who're otherwise seemingly upstanding citizens, leaders of their communities), though you can only kill them in secret and sadly most can't be hunted down.
You can also roleplay as a communist in the game (you are technically a soldier of a remnant of the Soviet state), but only ironically in the political aspect. Communism comes in many different flavors - capitalists/neofeudal gangs claim to be communists, there's lunatics worshiping Lenin statues, etc. More Soviet nostalgia than revolutionary politics.
