I'm about an hour into watching a LP and frankly it's looking like pretty standard 21st century AAA slop.
- primary protagonist is a mouthy, pushy, man-faced brown girlboss type who's shown as always right about everything (even though the events of the game are entirely her fault)
- villain is an evil huwite male who runs a corporation, frankly pretty impressive by real world standards but we're supposed to hate him because of reasons
- not so subtly mocking fans of both sci-fi and fantasy genres ("gamers and nerds suck, now buy our shit")
- dialog is a mixture of insufferable le quirk chungus XDDD quips and a whole lot of "I, me, my"
- female narcissism and emotionality is consistently portrayed as a good thing even when, again, it's explicitly shown as putting people in danger
I wouldn't be surprised if the bad guy says "Make Fiction Great Again" or some other hamhanded bullshit at this point. Why are all "creative" ventures so unremittingly terrible now, and how do these people keep getting jobs?
I know that the "developer" Josef Fares is a Lebanese immigrant to Sweden. That responded to his choice of two lead female protagonists for the game by using his not even grade school age children as a shield for criticism. Saying that the characters were based on his daughters. Which doesn't even make sense to me. How can 2 adult female characters with backgrounds be based on children under the age of 5?
I briefly played his other games 'Brothers, A Tale of Two Sons' and 'A Way Out' (I think they were free on PSN) and was not impressed. Very simple couch co-op game mechanics & storytelling that were boring over a decade ago. Yet, for some reason Fares is promoted as a huge success? Probably because he's an astroturfed example of the "benefits" of multicultural immigration to Sweden. I wouldn't be surprised if his company Hazelight studios has received ESG funding.
Personally, I think Fares looks like a mudslime chomo, that I wouldn't allow around children.. I also wouldn't play this game even if you gave it to me for free.
Yes, a lot of the positive reviews cite cool mechanics but everything I've seen has been really basic and derivative.
I'm still waiting for a platformer to surpass the original Super Mario Galaxy.