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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2527 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 24, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I gotta try this one, thanks.

My copotype was "boring", so I didn't get the worst result at the big event, but I think DE isn't this bleak. To me, the moral of its story is "you can't save the whole world, so choose your battles to make a difference". It means both letting go of your past mistakes, because even the figurines won't win her back, and understanding that things won't always go your way even if you do your best, but you can still do something that matters, you are not defined by what you haven't achieved, but by what you have.

That's also kind of the message of Esoteric Ebb, I just think it has a more optimistic lean to it. I only played (half of) DE once, so I don't know what all the alternatives are, but the problem with DE was less me being a goof and more The only way I found to get my gun back was doing a dirty job for a scummy landlord where you extort his tenants for rent or something like that. I didn't want to do that, so I didn't get my gun back, hoping I'd eventually find an alternate way of getting it, only to get the crisis sprung on me without realizing I'd need my gun then and there. A bunch of people died and my character started hating himself for being such a failure. It became super bleak. Maybe if you're willing to compromise on your morals it turns out a lot less bleak. Or maybe I missed a clever way to get the gun some other way. I don't want to spoiler Esoteric Ebb too much in the comparison, but the dilemmas that exist in the game were not quite that bleak, and were much more honestly presented. Choose A or B, with both having tradeoffs. DE never explicitly offered me a choice "exploit the tenants or people will die", it just played out that way later.

As I understand it, you need signatures from people living in a village which would displace them, but you could forge them instead, which is implied to be caught later and so has no bad effects for them. Also, there are a minimum of two other options, one getting Ruby's gun and the other crafting a Molotov Cocktail. But looking at the trailer I think there's no question that EE is a lot more fun, for lack of a better word, than DE. The world of DE is supposed to be quite bleak, if you don't like that it's not the game for you. Always knowing all consequences is obviously convenient, but imo DE's take is not bad once in a while. Though it's not the kind of story I'd always want to play, that's true.

EE has a world which is, in my opinion, a perfect amount of bleak. Less than DE but still some. I don't want to spoil the details about why, even in this spoiler tag. But there's a whole bunch of lore about how things were in the past and why they changed and all the problems that's causing here and now. But ultimately it comes out in favor of optimism. XYZ things are bad and worse now than it was before but instead of hopelessly clinging to the past we should forge ahead and improve the world we find ourselves in and make a new future. I would really like to resurrect this discussion after you or other people have played the game, because there's some really really clever and interesting stuff at the end of the game. Hopefully me even saying that is not too much of a spoiler. I very much agree with the author's general philosophy even if I disagree with a couple of their individual ideas.

Thanks for the rec, I'll check it out for sure!

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