Anyone have any favorite subversive/leftist games? There used to be a great one about the apple supply line where you had to move the nets to catch the guys jumping out of the factory in china and throw the e waste in a dumpster fire in pakistan. Banned from the app store of course lmao.
A very niche game called Disco Elysium
Obligatory plug: Hexbear now has an annual game jam. This year’s theme was the Soviet Union and we got some pretty badass games out of it
I’ve been having a blast with 2020’s Tonight We Riot, from Means Interactive.
Sidescrolling beat 'em up where you play as a literal crowd of anarcho-communist revolutionaries. The crowd copies what you do, and if your main guy happens to die you instantly switch to someone else. Other Marxist principles are literally baked into the gameplay, like when workers are hostile you can kill their managers and they’ll join you, but cops can never be rehabilitated.
I remember unlocking endless mode and getting to the point in it where the developers’ commentary just went “okay uhhhhhh we don’t have anything left to say we did not expect you to actually last this long” haha yes.
apart from the obvious disco elysium,
cloudpunk is really great, the gameplay itself is pretty simplistic and repetitive (you may consider it meditative or boring as hell) but the story and characters are fantastic, and its actually quite a positive story of carving out little oases of meaning and hope in even the most dystopian hypercapitalist hellscape. leftist cyberpunk in all the ways that cyberpunk 2077 isnt
frostpunk is bleak and tough but fantastic but not particularly leftist, but the ‘last autumn’ dlc is all about class relations and you can go hard into taking the workers/union side
the tropico series has one joke it milks to death which is “haha fidel corrupt dictator”, but if you can get past that its actually a fairly materialist citybuilder and also with cuban aesthetics (and music). the reason i add it here is that most management/strategy games have a primary meta-goal of building up the power/prestige/wealth/territory of the nation or whatever as their primary goal with happiness mostly just to stave off rebellion, this is one of the only ones where the main meta-goal is actually “make the people as happy as possible by providing for their basic human needs”. tropico 6 is the best of the series fwiw (and also the best one for avoiding cars)
havent played it myself but fursan al aqsa is a game where you play as a palestinian dude mowing down hordes of idf soldiers
hitman lets you dress up as zoolander and stab ghislaine maxwell to death, and also creatively murder a whole bunch of other bourgeois ghouls
I enjoyed Tropico when I played it. One of the things I don’t like about a lot of 4x games is that very few of them are actually about improving people’s lives and tropico does that.
I think it’s fine that you sometimes work with police in 2077, given your role as a solo, but what I hate is there’s never any missions where you work against the police. A gang never hires you to, like, steal evidence or intimidate a detective. Ora mission where you have to steal something valuable from a precinct and have to blast through the NCPD on your way out.
Silverhand is in V’s head screaming about smashing the corps, smashing the system, but there’s none of that punk ethos in the story. There’s like two lines where Silverhand complains that edgerunners in 2077 have sold out to the corps, and in some endings you get to fuck over Arasaka, but that’s it. I really liked the game for what it is, but the politics are disappointing.
Whoa it actually exists. The reviews for Fursan Al-Aqsa are absolutely based tho
It’s been plugged to death on here, but I’ll say Half Earth Socialism.
I’m loving it so far, but it seems like there’s like… absolutely no way to feasibly advance while keeping animal agriculture? I’m genuinely curious, is it impossible to save earth without getting rid of the animal agriculture industry, am I missing something in the game around fuel, or…?
Well, yeah, it’s trying to demonstrate that in real life keeping animal ag is uh checks notes the worst thing a modern society could do
