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):
Idk about this one. It’s not like the sole goal of the game is to enslave and exploit people/mons. I haven’t played it so I wouldn’t know but I was actually excited for a monster collector that didn’t continuously keep disappointing me like Game Freak does every other year.
The Pokémon comparisons are obvious but it doesn’t play at all like Pokémon, which is a turn based RPG, this game feels more like an action RPG/shooter/factory sim.
What the fuck happened. There was some pretty good discussion yesterday and now today it’s just nothing but useless trolling comments.
Sounds like g*mers felt ruffled by their new favourite game having both shit devs and fellow players. Both lemmygrad and hexbear usually fall like ton of bricks on a games and other products with devs and communities much less reactionary and here i see this low effort defenses.
Something’s up that’s for sure.
I’ve somehow managed to avoid all discourse about this game and am only just finding out about this.
As mentioned by others the game itself is nothing remarkable, it’s the description on steam and comments that make it disgusting.
I mean, this has always been true about the monster taming genre. This game just kinda leans into it like it’s a joke instead of pretending it isn’t happening. Not saying I’m a fan of that angle. In fact, the original trailer had CG video of pals working in sweat shops and they all looked sad and tired, and it was a huge turnoff for me from the game. But let’s not pretend that the premise of every monster taming game ever is that you force them into servitude and almost always into violence.
That said, after seeing actual gameplay, all you do is send your pals out on your ranch and they perform chores. It’s not especially dark or gruesome about it. Sometimes the chore is helping you make food or medicine, and sometimes it’s mining or logging, and yes, sometimes it’s making weapons or ammo. I’m not a fan of the memes about slavery or the people who think it’s funny, but the game marketing doesn’t strike me as all that problematic. I would argue it’s worse that you run around punching and shooting these creatures and making them fight to the death, but again, that’s the whole genre. Did you know there are games where all you do is shoot people? People love that shit
You can also capture and sell human NPCs.
Supposedly in the game’s lore Pals were also originally humans (somehow…), which is why you can capture both with the same pokeball.
I really don’t think Pals are a dogwhistle for humans. Its just a monster collection game where you can make the monsters do stuff. Its legitimately not that deep.
Plus it means you can focus on tasks you find fun instead of some of the busy work of survival games.
You can also do that by not designing the game to have busy work, tbf
The thing about survival games is that the busy work is the point. Participation in it at first and finding ways to get around it as your base gets more complex is part of the fun. You start from nothing and eventually through effort and planning get powerful. The busywork is the obstacle for the player to overcome.
Without the busy work survival games become some kind of BR. Which has its appeal but scratch fundementally different itches. A pizza and a burger are quite different even though both have bread.
When escapism is no longer liberating, the goal of the g*mer is to become the oppressor
idk, i still get an insane amount of joy from lighting up fictional bigots. it’s a special treat. :)
I think the writing is generally on the side of satirizing the monster collection genre rather than, I don’t even know what you’re getting at, trying to advocate for slavery?
Now, is it done well? No, the game design is still fundamentally one of power fantasy, wake me up when there’s a Pal Revolt mechanic, but it’s not even all that ambiguous.
This is literally just “frenworld” the reddit Nazi community (but I repeat myself) embodied in a game.
“frenworld”
Oh shit “fren” = “pal”, you’re right.
Yeah it’s an annoying habit I have lol
The hitler particles in white gamers can be seen from space with their reaction to this game. The reviews on xbox are also very disturbing.
Steam is probably one of the whitest male gamer spaces, which is what I thought until I discovered Xbox.
I would argue that the pals aren’t an analogy for humans, because you can actually capture (and enslave) the human npc’s in this game.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=z2zi7XD8how&pp=ygUcQ2F0Y2hpbmcgYSBodW1hbiBpbiBwYWx3b3JsZA%3D%3D
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’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.
Right? It seems to be just another early access survival crafting game like the dozens if not hundreds of others that have come and gone over the last several years. The only gimmick seems to be “what if you could abuse Pokemon haha we’re so edgy” and over 90% of players seem to agree that’s a good enough gimmick to carry the rest of the game.
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 feels so 4chan adjacent that I’m looking at the last few friend 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. 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?
You can capture full fledged NPC humans and make them your “Pals”.
Yes you can enslave actual humans.
Seconding the recommendation to touch grass. You sound like one of those insufferable pedants who joins a DnD game only to complain about “Colonialist Tropes”.
Repeat after me: doing bad things in a game, or creating a game that encourages the player to do bad things, is not itself inherently bad.
It’s why I love this instance so much, only place which remains lucid during even the biggest of bullshit.
Yeah this game is just a mish-mash glorifying both slavery AND animal cruelty. Very uncomfortable… and the fact this game is so popular speaks volumes.
glorifying . . . animal cruelty
That’s the whole genre
You really think the entire monster collection genre is “glorifying animal cruelty”?
Sincerely yes, I think there is no conclusion you can come to about games like Pokemon except that an integral part of the premise is “What if dogfighting was flashier,” and they do various things to try to overwrite that fact, but the fact remains.
Then you don’t know anything about the genre and you clearly haven’t put any thought into it past “two dogs fighting each other”. Especially considering in game it’s canon that Pokémon can leave their trainers if they didn’t want to stay.
Or do you want to extend this to Shin Megami Tensei too? Is collecting demons and using them against your enemies just dogfighting too?
It’s just a vulgar misrepresentation of the genre and my special interest (the creator of Pokémon got the idea from collecting fucking bugs), and you sound like one of those PETA people who have also been misrepresenting Pokémon since like the fucking 90s.
Especially considering in game it’s canon that Pokémon can leave their trainers if they didn’t want to stay.
copium. i trapped it in a ball and then locked it in a box forever.
Not copium because it’s fucking canon but cry more
writers can huff copium too
lmao No matter how many times I tell electrode to Explode, he doesn’t leave me, so
who cares what the LoRe says? The devs are too cowardly to make the abuse victim do more than be grumpy, so that shit means nothing.I don’t give a shit if it’s your special interest (it has been mine in the past), that doesn’t insulate it from criticism. In SMT at least you actually persuade demons to join you. With Pokemon you do violence to subdue and subjugate them and little hearts and friendship meters don’t change the skeleton. Pokemon Ranger makes a much better case because you’re at least only temporarily conscripting them, but don’t you fucking tell me that the mainline practice of beating and paralyzing a juvenile animal and then sticking it in a computer box forever is pro-social from a standpoint that considers the animal.
K
Edit: I was going to originally just leave this here cause I didn’t wanna bother responding to someone using purposefully misrepresenting arguments about Pokémon but I mentioned it being my special interest not cause “it’s above criticism” but cause I know what I’m talking about more than someone using PETA level arguments.
You don’t know what you’re talking about, so I have nothing to argue with you, I’d rather just block you cause you’ve already made your mind up about it and talking about it in discussion is pointless because it’s your uninformed opinion anyway. 🤷🏿♂️
Whait till you learn abput gta. You can actually kill people there.
lemm.ee really aren’t sending us their best. They’re sending nazis, they’re sending slavery fetishists, they’re sending 4channers; they’re just sending awful fucking people.
I made account there when lemmy world was down from time to time last year. I don’t care whats the domain i send from because I read a lot of different opinions. This here is a weak one. I’m not supporting slavery because of my stance about that game the same way I don’t support murdering people on the streets. Slavery is newer thing in games but murder is normalized, so this sounds hypocrytical and virtue signaling.
Yeah no I’m not here to debate you, the point is to drag your malaised “well acktually” debatelord horseshit. You actively consume and uplift a media property that outright leans into the concepts of chattel slavery of both man and beast, thinking you’re being cute or clever by “wait til you see GTA”. Your shit is not worth debating; if you’re cool with shit like this, your opinions literally mean nothing to me from that point on other than ‘something to be avoided’.
“Virtue signaling”, please take your cracker ass elsewhere.
I got into a scuffle with their admin and did a little journalism and what I found out about that instance won’t surprise you one bit.
Can you enslave them and work them to death?
Dude your votes.
Never forget 💧😔👋
You mean the game where you can be a mass shooter and perform a drawn out torture on a character? Really not helping your point.
