Steam, lemmy and reddit are currently creaming themselves over a game which devs makes multiple really cringe "jokes" about slavery and exploitation. Read the steam page descriptions.
Those "pals" are clearly antropomorphised creatures being dogwhistle for humans. And if you read the game reviews, even the g*mers are not lost on that fact (just they love that):
The game itself is fine, it's a fun, if fairly generic "survival" sort of game with heavy base building mechanics. But the memes about it all became about "edgy pokemon with guns and brutality" so this very PG sort of game is being treated like some R rated gorefest by idiots trying to be funny because their favourite youtuber made a joke about it. So naturally CHUDs love it because they get an excuse to be openly horrible.
It feels so 4chan adjacent that I'm looking at the last few friends in my contact list that I thought were on the level like "how do you not sense this? is your nose broken? Are your eyes sightless?" I don't like having to actively weigh and question how much my last vestiges of irl social contact are worth/whether it's worth having that fight over their unnervingly 4channer-adjacent slop.
Even worse is people keep justifying it with 'well Game Freak doesn't try/innovate/QA check anymore' but that... That shouldn't justify gleeful-slavery frenworld. Cassette Beasts is right fuckin there, as is Tem-Tem. (Neither of which really moved me personally, but that's beside the point.) The more I mull it over the more it genuinely pisses me off. Absolutely, I'd love an engaging, lore-heavy monster tamer alternative to Pokemon with the way Game Freak's been handling the franchise lately, but this one should've been sniffed out and rejected from the jump, I feel.
I wouldn't really say this is 4-Chan adjacent though? 4-Chan made a knock off pokemon game in the past, and it's about as bad as you'd expect. I'm seriously starting to think I'm playing an entirely different game to everyone else here, I just haven't seen the stuff people are upset about. The text of the game is very edgy, but the gameplay is just fairly generic. It could maybe be a statement about video games and pokemon in general maybe, but I wouldn't even give them that much credit. The writing just feels lazy, to try and be edgy for edgy's sake, but the gameplay doesn't at all, it feels more tacked on than anything else. It's barely in the game.
But again, maybe I'm not seeing the same thing other people are and I'm not entirely sure why I'm missing these things if they're so obvious to other people who have played it. This isn't me saying "everyone else is wrong" rather, it's me asking "Why am I not seeing this thing other people are seeing?"
what the hell did i just read?
I wouldn't even given a second for this kind of borefest, and not even chuds posturing is remarkable, but what the devs wrote on the steam page immediately risen red flags, and the fact that was perfectly understood and enthusiastically accepted in the reviews also blared horns.
So it's not as if the chuds abuse the game to do horrible things, this game IS about horrible things with cutesy graphic as excuse for the people who wont.
It's more strange than anything else to me. Feels like I downloaded an entirely different game to everyone else. There is edgy text on some loading screens and descriptions in the game, and that's about it really. It's like the person writing the game and steam description and the people actually designing the gameplay never actually interacted at all. The game just says "Wow, this is so horrible, aren't we so cool and edgy?" but the gameplay isn't really like that at all. As I said somewhere else, this isn't subtext, it's just text, and if I didn't know what the advertising was like I'd assume it's a bad translation before assuming the guy doing the writing was just an edgy loser. Feels more like a marketing gimmick more than anything else, as if they just had the cutesy discount pokemon and the text was just fairly generic, it wouldn't have gotten nearly the attention it did. It's controversy for controversy's sake more than anything else.
It's basically a glorified asset flip except the assets are stolen and the game goes out of its way to be as immoral as possible.
Which sadly puts it just so slightly above what the game's industry has been shitting out for the last couple decades.