Games

Played this recently after hearing good things. It broadly has the "build cozy community in late-stage capitalism" vibe. The early game (first 3 hours?) is excellent and pairs very well with the game mechanics. There is a real feeling of living on the edge even though the risk of failure is allegedly faked (the game isn't a roguelike). However, after that you become powerful enough that the survival mechanics are rendered irrelevant; you have enough money to buy as much food as you want, and can easily forage or buy scrap material to repair yourself. Thus the latter two thirds relies heavily on its story, which is really a bit one-note. The fundamental fantasy is that you can solve everybody's problems, making you this bizarre superhuman space-station-spanning force. This works against the overall plot that is about being a marginalized outsider building community to carve out a place for a small life in the cosmos, because you can singlehandedly remake the reality of the entire space station. Interesting conflicts within this new community you have made are not really ever explored, and it's entirely stuck in the wholesome solarpunk commune vs. giant menacing intergalactic corporations rut. Even the late-game refugee plot (ripped from today's headlines!) does not fully explore the interesting angle of how a humanistic system can handle refugees when life support systems could be authentically taxed by their arrival. I think here of The Dispossessed, where (spoilers to follow) a planet-wide famine is addressed in a messy but basically equitable way.

I've heard the sequel is a lot more difficult so perhaps it is worth checking out.-