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It’s clear that wokeness isn’t the cause of bad game writing. The very suggestion is ridiculous.
Firstly, game writing has always been terrible barring a number of exceptions that can literally be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Secondly, countries with less ‘wokeness’, like Japan, have even worse, more hackneyed and more cringe game writing than their western counterparts.
Thirdly, some of the rarest examples of good game writing, like Disco Elysium, are explicitly leftist, woke fiction (bordering on actual political propaganda) far to the left of the average ‘Sweet Baby Inc’ employee.
The vast majority of bad game writing since the invention of video games, and probably still today, can be lain squarely at the feet of straight white (and Japanese) men. This is not in any way to suggest that wamen or minorities are any better (just look at modern YA fiction to see they are not), but it’s clear that the dire state of game writing is not their fault.
This... this is perhaps the single most offensive opinion I've ever read on this forum.
Yeah... I wanted to take issue with calling it woke to begin with, but saying it's particularly better than other games appreciated for ti's story is wild.
I mean, it's definitely woke, it's not class reductionist leftist fiction that rejects wokeness in a Zizek-type way, it's very explicitly in support of American-style blank slatist wokism even if it occasionally makes fun of its excesses in an in-joke type way. Stuff like the way the game responds through Kim and your own thoughts if you make Harry a reactionary or sympathize with nativists is pretty clear about that.
I've only done one playthrough, and hardly paid that much attention to the dialogue, I recognize that "woke" lost a lot of it's meaning through overuse, but no, I do not recognize being anti-reactionary, and anti-nativist as woke.
Yes, I think it's frequently very witty, I laughed out loud many times while playing it (which almost never happens in games except guffawing at the worst pun-laden vanilla WoW quests), there are a huge number of well-crafted references to interesting history, philosophy and literature and the debate around them that's shared with a lot of fiction I enjoy (like Joyce, Wilde, etc). There's good wordplay, the underlying mystery is interesting as a fan of mystery/detective fiction which is a rote but often underappreciated kind of writing. It gets its noir tone mostly correct, I think the lore of the setting is just the right side of weird fiction and historical analogy to be interesting, I very much enjoy the effort put into minor details like fonts and fashion, and I think the cohesive setting as a kind of 'what if Königsberg had been the epicenter of a communist revolution' is fascinating. I never skipped a line of dialogue and was often positively surprised by it, and I think the dice rolling was well-integrated with the narrative.
Oh, definitely. It starts off looking as an open-and-shut, it's clear what happened here, we know who dunnit but we can't ever prove it case. Then Harry goes crazy and blows the entire thing wide open and it's all turned on its head - nothing happened the way we thought was so obvious and plain. And they make the twist work, even with the miracle ending.
It does work for a European setting; the Sunday Visitor being a guy who's some sort of EU bureaucrat in Strasbourg but just popping over every week to slum it in Martinaise, with all his development agency bullshit lines, is convincing. So is the idea of the descendant of the ex-royal house working as a merchant banker in Luxembourg (see the last Habsburg.) After the failed Revolution, the ordinary people are still living in bad conditions and maybe even worse off than before, while the displaced high status types landed on their feet elsewhere.
Yeah I agree, I do think the writing has a bitterness I find distasteful (especially because, come on, life in Estonia is way, way better than it's ever been), but it has a way of producing interesting characters that I think is really great.
I suspect being a communist in Estonia makes you extremely unpopular in a way that it doesn't in the west, an asymmetry that is oft complained about on the right. Not just when the game was developed, but especially after 2022 where nostalgia for communism is going to get associated with Russian imperialism even moreso than it already was.
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