Outside of Disco Elysium, of course. Looking for games with great narratives and some level of Class Consciousness.

Bonus points if it plays well on Steam Deck!

  • TraumaDumpling@hexbear.net
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    6 months ago

    obligatory mention of the metal gear series, especially Peace Walker where you literally help the sandinistas and the KGB fight the CIA despite Snake’s constant monologues about how he isn’t on anyone’s side or something.

    Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries has a kind of weirdly restrained straight-faced satire going on, many of the missions have characters pointing out that your actions are war crimes, and several campaigns have explicitly communist-themed factions like the Crimson Inclination as the enemies that point out how you are running dogs for aristocrats, and the primary campaign has you attack an innocent farming space-colony for supplies (with the option to help them instead for less rewards) and destroy dense cities during an invasion (your feudal boss on that one, Prince Davion, insists it is the Least Bad Option while your mechanic protests, while the enemies point out that Davion recently married a child bride to justify the land grab since the territory you are invading is between his and his child bride’s holdings). Whenever you destroy a building on one of the ‘space colony’ themed maps, you can see silhouettes of (unarmed) people fly out of exploding airlocks to their deaths.

    Cruelty Squad is kind of like if an Eli Valley cartoon was an FPS game, every NPC dialogue could be a tagline here, and in fact some are. Playing this game has definitely made me less relatable to normal people however, i have accidentally upset 2 people because of how it has shaped my thoughts, with things like referring to my body as a ‘meat hole with a consciousness trapped inside’ (the edges of the screen in cruelty squad resemble flesh in some circumstances, and the game engages with relevant existential themes with lines like ‘divine light severed: you are a flesh automaton animated by neurotransmitters’). One of several endings explicitly quotes and namedrops Georges Bataille.

    idk if it counts but the ending of the first ArmA has a twist where it turns out you were lied to about which faction committed an atrocity that started the conflict and implicates the USA as responsible.

    Brigador takes place on a planet that is subject to imperialist regime change, where the Great Leader was considered problematic but beneficial (he made water affordable!) and that his deposal is a bad thing. You explicitly work for the badguys.

    • KhanCipher [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      6 months ago

      Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries has a kind of weirdly restrained straight-faced satire going on

      This is kinda a new thing for Battletech in general, especially for a game taking place around the time spanning the 3rd and 4th Succession War. Which is a bit strange as BT lore is normally not written like that. Like in the actual handbooks (that were written in the 80s and 90s) straight up portrayed Davion and Steiner as right and just in starting the 4th Succession War.

      Let’s not even get into the whole premise of the universe is literally just ‘Oops, the Roman Empire fell because Space Hitler got power, and now everybody started fighting for control of that chair and thusly lost a lot of tech along the way’.