- 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.
Isn’t she kinda missing the point that the protagonist is a middle-aged white guy that everyone else clearly thinks is a loser weirdo and is only given the barest respect because he’s a cop?
She clearly has not actually played the game.
oh boy… another game about a quirky girl and a cat
Also, how the hell is that concept going to carry DE’s writing? What biting ideological commentary will there be in a cozy game?
“Whatever you do, do NOT look up the post. It’s nearly four years old. Let it go.”Savoire Faire - you dance naked in the moonlight to Taylor Swift’s new album. Floating in the space left behind other witches. Logic - It’s time.
Time for what? Time for a new tour? Am I late?
Logic - it is time to fight Muhammed (Peace be upon him) in the Astral Plane. We must fight the moors and return to paganism. Encyclopedia [Skill Check] - the Moorish invasion of Spain and subsequent reconquista brought about the inquisition and the institution of Christianity in Western Europe
lmao
Wait that would be a good game actually
Every other western indie game is a “cozy ghibli-inspired solarpunk farming sim with social elements where you can pet the doggo”. Look, I get it, life sucks, and it’s nice to have a reprieve. Yet, to borrow from the author: “do we really need another game” where you’re a smol bean in a world of childish whimsy? I feel like that’s a pretty well treaded path (if on the off chance you feel like you don’t have enough, learn french; french indies are to childish whimsy what japanese indies are to sexual perversion).
Cheap, petty dunking out of the way, I would like to address some points:
I.
a) You can’t take the narrative mechanism of DE and plop into a different game; Harry has a broken psyche, he’s in the middle of restructuring his image of self (or if you ask my friend with DID, he’s just fine, he just has DID and the character we play is a newborn in the plural system). You can grow and develop his personality over the span of a few days because the man just had a meltdown. Regular people don’t talk to a skinhead and become a fascist 8 hours later, nor do they see a bust of fantasy-Marx and turn their entire personality into “you know what, ultraliberalism IS bullshit”b) In a sense, the game is not about Harry. You have to insist in order to even find out what he looks like or what his name is, and you can just make something up completely in the latter case. If the game would be about “being a white guy” then it’s self-defeating because Harry himself no longer wishes to be Harry, going back hurts him. Somewhere, at a fundamental level he knows “being Harry” has failed him and he’s ready to grasp onto literally anything else there is.
II.
a) Reducing the diversity of the game to “main character is white” reaches bad faith territory for me. The entirety of Revachol is filled with weird and wonderful people, and we’re able to glimpse into each and every one of their struggles precisely because we’re not one of them, we’re strangers, and we’re only there in passing. If harry was instead a white woman protagonist but then all these working class and poor people were removed from the game then that would be a net negative for inclusion.b) The core team that made DE is from the Baltics, Eastern Europe. You know, that part of Europe that endured sustained economic, political, and military aggression until it became a tattered shell, an open chasm, where the best and brightest left their homeland for the west in order to become nannies, and toilet scrubbers, and waiters, migrants treated like shit, so they could have a better life than living in the fucking wreck necessitated by the west’s destruction of socialism. A story that to this day can only be told by allegory lest you be shouted down by idiots reassuring you, a native, that you don’t really know how bad communism was and how Stalin nationalised his uncle’s egg monopoly and that’s why they had to move to Florida.
III.
a) The story is also, not a detective story in and of itself. The game’s canon reveal of the murder mystery is indistinguishable from a joke ending; some commie dead-ender you never interacted with before killed your guy while under the influence of the fumes of an illusive psychic stick-bug. Columbo, this is not. The story just uses the framing of a murder mystery. By the end of it, you feel bad for the people of Revachol. At every point the game makes it hard for you to “focus” on the case because that’s not the point of the game.french indies are to childish whimsy what japanese indies are to sexual perversion).
Interesting that that’s how the cards played.
I’m sure that OP would have had a problem with how much contempt the story and the girls cat would have had for her main character if the writing would stayed the same. Actually, the cat murdered klaasje and is an incel communist.
a) Reducing the diversity of the game to “main character is white” reaches bad faith territory for me. The entirety of Revachol is filled with weird and wonderful people, and we’re able to glimpse into each and every one of their struggles precisely because we’re not one of them, we’re strangers, and we’re only there in passing. If harry was instead a white woman protagonist but then all these working class and poor people were removed from the game then that would be a net negative for inclusion.
I was going to say this too, yeah sure Harry is a middle aged white guy but the world is DE is very diverse, and diverse in an extremely well fleshed out and complex way that honestly put a lot of other fantasy and SciFi to shame. Like so many stories just do the lazy “wut if elves/aliens were like black/gay people, hun?” while DE has this whole complex history, that’s presented to you in a fractured way so you’re never sure if you’re getting the whole story or just being fed BS, that makes the complex race and class relations feel a lot closer to they work in the real world. Also it portrays and condemns racism in what I think is probably the best ways it ever has been in media.
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.
In case anyone felt bad about being mean to her, she’s design lead at improbable.io, which “makes metaverse infrastructure and applications, as well as simulation software for video games and corporate use.”
DE’s ‘insanely well crafted narrative system’ and wonderful writing are to serve a point, to create impactful text/subtext through the mechanics that the developers were passionate about. This sort of backseat creativity irks the hell out of me because I promise you if the exact team that made DE set out to make some quirky witch cat game or something, it wouldn’t have been nearly as good. Because the team were passionate about DE’s subject matter and not passionate about quirky witch cat games.
The people passionate about cat witch games are making them and if they’re not as good maybe that says something about the idea. You can’t just take ‘good concept’ and combine it with ‘idea i personally like’ and get good art out of it.
Like, yeah, okay, let’s change the story of the divorced amnesiac suicidal drunkard in a decaying town trying to solve an apparent lynching into Harriet Potter and the Live Laugh Lost Kitty, but please oh please maintain the vacuous idea of “good writing and mechanics”, as if the writing which is grimy and confrontational and political and raw and the mechanics which are meant to represent how Harry thinks specifically is something you can just rip cleanly from the world they wanted to build and put into the idyllic Switzerland cat pastel game
Harriet Potter and the Live Laugh Lost Kitty
fuckin lmao that’s hilarious
I wonder what she thinks about Calico, which is probably reasonably close to what she’s describing.
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Rosa Carbó-Mascarell when the quirky witch cat game by Robert Kurvitz that she requested has the protagonist kill themself to win an argument
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listen to me, get this, triplets
Replacing the voices in Harry’s head with dodecatuplets.
haunted by all the different people her child may grow up to be?
You find a lone cigarette on the ground, still lit.
Soldier: Mother, stamp it out! Littering is the enemy!
Girlboss: It’s a cigarette, so what? God, mom, you’re always like this! What’s so interesting about shit you find on the ground?
Starchild: A bird dropped it. You should find the bird and return its cigarette.I also want this now
This sounds like a mundane modern take on Slay the Princess. I can hear the Voices Of arguing this.
Ugh there’s too many gritty detective settings these days! Has anyone considered making a comfy pastelcore game? I bet nobody has ever made a game like that before
She could just play animal crossing and stardew valley ffs
my immediate reaction was an audible “oof”
straight up morale damage
A village in the Alps has absolutely zero potential for any interesting writing because there is very very little mixture of political beliefs, backgrounds and class there.
If you want interesting writing then your setting is essential, it is the material base from which the conditions are set that influence all possible options to writing.
witch—>early modern witch panics—>the religious wars in the old swiss confederacy; actually a fairly lush setting between the religious shitheads and imperial powers that transited the area and made use of swiss soldiers
the OP probably meant it as a no-friction generic fantasy setting tho lol
Yeah you can problem invent problems via exploring how a visibly obvious witch might be treated by the townsfolk of the middle of nowhere on the alps. But you’re essentially inventing that problem.
The best realistic conflict you could go for could be how women are treated. Honestly a Disco Elysium style exploration of misogyny and sexism could be interesting and I’m quite sure several characters from Disco Elysium would have treated the player completely differently as a woman.
But this person seeking “diversity” isn’t asking for that. Somehow they want idyllic cozyness at the same time as having fantastic writing. These two things don’t exist. Cozy comfyness can be lovely and healing but the story of your nice day out with your cat isn’t going to be incredible writing. That can be nice in its own right, I like several Slice of Life animes where literally NOTHING happens, but what’s good about them doesn’t come from the story but from the feeling and emotion they give you.
I don’t think you even need to invent problems, swiss mercenaries were only a thing because of how poor the swiss used to be, so that ‘idyllic village’ would be incredibly poor maybe at some point some people come back from a campaign by some french prince and some that left the village are now dead and some have gotten a little bit of money, like humanism in switzerland was explicitly against the mercenary system just because of how gruesome it was every 5th person would become a mercenary and a third wouldn’t come back. Humanists saw the buying and selling of flesh as immoral, and that it doesn’t enrich the mercenaries but rather professional outfits and foreign nobles. This all also happens around the time of the reformation so there’s quite a bit to explore.
You got local myths like Sennentuntschi where I’m sure there’s a lot of feminist writing that could be done, Mundaun did rewrite the ‘Teufelsbrücke’.
Of course that requires people to actually read about regions and their history instead of just using shit as wallpaper which too often switzerland is because they saw a ghibli movie at one point.
That’s to say that you can have incredibly interesting stories pretty much everywhere where people are it’s just that writers are lazy.
Aha! I think this is what bothers me the most about these sorts of “cozy” Stardew Valley-esque indie games. Everyone is just an idealised version of a person and they all get along really well. There’s no conflict, no assholes or jerks. Everyone is just happy and friendly, and that’s boring and unrealistic as fuck.
I think that’s kinda the point, games like Stardew Valley are for when you just wanna turn your brain off a bit and enjoy a comfortable atmosphere
I don’t mean Stardew itself, I mean a lot of “Stardew like” sort of games. Quite a few characters in Stardew are jerks to you, or seem like generally unpleasant people until you get to know them. A lot of games trying to recreate the atmosphere of Stardew miss that, and have every character acting like your best friend as soon as you meet them, just overly familiar and friendly, it feels really insincere.
Stardew Valley has an incel character nobody likes and some vet with PTSD from shooting too many brown kids in the face.
That’s probably what annoys me the most about this tweet. If anything there’s a bit of an excess of cozy cute indie games right now, everyone is trying to be Stardew. Feels like a bit of an over correction from the “dark gritty” stuff from a decade or two ago.
Weirdly I think it could work, if one flipped the entire premise on its head: “young witch” becomes “young witch only a few years out of magical grad school and already burnt out and falling apart” and “a small alpine town” becomes “the setting starts out as some sleepy idyllic town from an indeterminate time, but flows seamlessly between that and a decaying rustbelt town and a low-cyberpunk slum without any character acknowledging this” and “the missing cat” talks and eats cigarettes and becomes your inexplicably grounded foil for the rest of an incredibly banal plot that’s entirely out of sorts with the way the world is literally falling apart around you.
Yeah! Almost every magic-caster setting has an awful undercurrent of inequality where mages rule the “muggles” pretty much effortlessly, and any protagonist starting low is actually just elevated to hang with the cool masters of magic.
Or it could go the Technomancer or Case of the Toxic Spell Dump direction, where magic and wonder are as subject to being ground up to oil the gears of capital as anything else and the most common career for a young mage is decades on the Industrial Enchanting factory line, churning out flying sportscarpets or assembling Wands of Kill Insurgent.
A village in the Alps has absolutely zero potential for any interesting writing because there is very very little mixture of political beliefs, backgrounds and class there.
Ottoman sieges? The fortress of national socialism? The rise and fall of Austria-Hungary? The slave labor of swabian children? Thats just of the top of my head here
Mundaun was alright. Think reformation era Switzerland could be a great setting for a game as well.
But they probably just want a nice slice of life game.
A village in the Alps has absolutely zero potential for any interesting writing
Have you heard of the game Pentiment?
Or “A Bavarian Tale”
A village in the Alps has absolutely zero potential for any interesting writing because there is very very little mixture of political beliefs, backgrounds and class there.
Tell me you’ve never read Thomas Manns seminal novel “Der Zauberberg”
Also, the beloved children’s novel, Heidi, is literally right fucking there
Ugh yeah I HATE all these generic fluffy indie games on the website itch.io!!! There are sooo many of them that I would love a list of them
to playto ban! Please comment down below the worst offenders (especially if they’re free)Well I can tell you one thing, DO NOT play A Short Hike, a short little game about a STINKY BIRD walking up a mountain.
That’s such a woated game. I definitely HAVEN’T collected all 20 golden feathers or collected every item or fished every fish or gotten a high score at beachstickball
I didn’t even know it contained such BAD things. Thanks for letting me know so I don’t WASTE my time finding the rest of the feathers or playing BEACHSTICKBALL which sounds BORING.
Do not play Voices of The Void. That game is set in the Swiss Alps 🤢🤢🤢
I completed the tutorial then I got lost in the woods lol
Enable silly mode in the settings. Go to the console in the server room. Type in “maxwell”. Find the feline bastard, he’s out there.
How do you have -1 downvotes?
I do? Let me dislike myself to make it even
I’m certain it has a basis in a terrible reactionary reflex but my reaction to her proposed “improved” story is just immediate visceral contempt. I just can’t stand the kinda recent prevalence of squeaky clean stories about a euro witch that saves the day with the power of friendship, small animals, and being gay (but in a safe marketable way). I feel like this is the absolutely wrong opinion to have but I can’t shake it.
It’s not reactionary to want art that actually reflects life instead of just telling you “it’s gonna be okay, white people got this.”
I don’t think there’s anything reactionary about not wanting the most generic indie game of all time in place of DE.
Well the disco elysium replacement bit is just the icing, I already hate this micro genre lol
I think we’re all giving her “critique” too much thought. Kinda seems like she just wants people to ask her about her completely original idea for a witch-cat-detective game, which I’m sure is very different from DE but also the same.
Edit: Like here I’ll do it too. “I really loved the writing and cinematography of Dune Part 1 and 2, but those movies are just white cishet savior fantasies. I would have loved to see a movie about a woman who leads a revolution to save their neighbor’s cat.”
that’s the problem with twitter now. all the real idiots left and now it’s just people begging for attention.
switch out the drug-fueled washed out deadbeat middle-aged white man for a yuppie young neo-pagan swiss white woman who has an outdoor cat problem, but keep everything about disco elysium the same
i’ll be honest, I kinda want to see the shit-flinging the baltic commies can come up with for the western euro-nerds
