- obviously there’s the fact that her critiques of DE are so unabashedly surface-level that you cannot tell if she’s actually played the game or read a plot summary/review of it.
- but there’s also the fact that she’s proposing a supposed improvement on what DE is with her own prompt, which in-and-of-itself is the lowest form of critique in my eyes–‘what if you had an entirely different idea?’
- and then the prompt itself is a doozy:
- she somehow found a way to both critique DE for being unimaginative with its scenario/having a white man protag and propose, in alternative, the absolute whitest possible scenario imaginable
- in the implicit shift from a grimy Eastern Europe to a comfy Western Europe, she’s managed to gentrify her scenario proposed in a critique about diversity
- she wants to keep disco elysium’s, unexamined by her, ‘wonderful writing’, while stripping it of all the rawness and deliberate confrontation that is at the heart of it that would conflict with the idyllic nature of her scenario and her stated opposition to griminess
- her idea of a more diverse story, if we’re taking it as she’s presenting it, is swapping a white guy with a white gal, which, I mean, diversity win, I guess.
- the fact that this is the most generic, safest-possible indie game idea imaginable. I could go on itch.io and find 50 of pretty much that game. this is the idea that like 50% of developers have when they’re thinking of a quick point-and-click game for a game jam.
i could go on, but the most scathing possible point I could make to this tweet is that this person is a BAFTA Judge 
Disco Elysium wouldn’t work with anything but a white male protagonist because one of the major themes is that you’re a complete loser fuckup but you still command begrudging respect from others because of the intersection of your race, gender, and occupation.
The game gives you the ability to shape the protagonist’s political ideology and it wouldn’t have the same effect if the protagonist did not materially benefit from oppression.
That’s not to say that you couldn’t make a DE-style game with, say, a black male protagonist, but I think DE is able to hit certain beats and make certain points that you couldn’t otherwise.
I don’t know if I’ve ever seen someone mention it on here, but Sunset is a narrative-driven adventure game where you play as an afrolatina maid employed by a wealthy businessman in a fictional south american country undergoing political turmoil.
You also bring up why it’s so good if you make Harry become a communist. It’s good because it makes no sense for him, so he has to actually grapple with the concept. He has no reason whatsoever to be a communist and the only person who believes he’s being genuine is Kim (maybe the two students too). A lot of the communist vision quest involves the detective tricking himself with various rhetorical devices.
He’s a white amnesiac alcoholic cop who suddenly decides he’s a revolutionary. He’s never read a single word of theory and his initial understanding is that he’s the only true communist in the world. Other characters largely disregard the communist stuff he says because they see it as irrelevant. He’s a cop. They already know who he is. The detective is so far out of his depth that he might even try tricking himself into believing he’s the reincarnation of his universe’s Marx.