They're still going on about dyed hair and piercings
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2026
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Slop.
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For posting all the anonymous reactionary bullshit that you can't post anywhere else.
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I love how people will describe how to fix a game franchise and never once mention game mechanics, programming, style, whether they have a good idea to work from, etc
if these tourists actually respected games as a medium they would be very offended by this
Uhh everyone knows that if you simply put a bunch of nerds that look like 90s John Carmack and John Romero in a room with computers, pizza, Mountain Dew, and posters of bikini babes on the walls, good games will just magically come out
in a Marxist sense, a bunch of nerds that look like 90s John Carmack and John Romero in a room with computers, pizza, Mountain Dew, and posters of bikini babes on the walls are precisely the material conditions required for vibeo gane
False, you can do also bunch of nerds that look like 80s Pete Burns in a room with computers, pizza, Mountain Dew, and posters of bikini babes and you will end up with video games with some banger synthwave soundtracks.
I use Arch btw
What vulgar materialists think Marx would say if he was resurrected in todays world
What Marx actually would say
"If Marx was alive today he would be a Celeste speedrunner!" "No, if Marx was alive today he would make 3 hour video essays about how Signalis left him with chronic depression and recurring nightmares!"
Marx if he was alive today: "Actually i am quite fond of Heaven Will Be Mine!"
Always
That is a different genre of post that while typically more sophisticated than the chud g*mer still ultimately fails to understand the creative process.
Reading that made me wince but also feel bad for the poster because they probably got torn to shreds in the replies
Honestly sick of hexbear getting worked up about that post, it's literally the same kind of crap as the chud in OP but with the reactionary sentiment being hidden behind concern trolling about cottagecore aesthetics.
Noone on hexbear is concerned about cottagecore aesthetics. The post is just oddly tone deaf, it's the equivalent of saying this soup is great but it would be better if it was icecream.
Nah, that's not what is said there at all and i don't think your analogy holds any water. A disco like doesn't need the DE dead of winter depression vibe or the post soviet shock therapy wasteland grimyness to work, Esoteric Ebb has clearly proven that the gameplay can be transplanted to other settings when you have a good and prolific lead writer and a skilled art team, and that this is a viable way to create good RPGs with a very modest budget. The bright colors, the lighter tone, the emphasis on Pratchet-style comedy, that all worked perfectly for EE.
Yes, i get it, EE had shit politics compared to DE, we've had threads about that were i went into that part of the game myself, but that liberalism was not due to the setting being Pratchet style fantasy instead of magical realism in a bombed out liminal space version of Estonia. You can do good political commentary in literally any setting if you know how to take its base and superstructure apart dialectically, and EE did try to comment on fantasy racism in a postcolonial environment, it had takes on Fantasy Palestine and everything, and that could have worked as smoothly as the rest of the writing, but it was written by a Swedish socdem who thinks we should babysit 4chan nazis until they turn into nazbols so it really fell flat in that regard.
I don't see why it would be impossible to write a good disco like with the "witch searches missing cat in the alps" premise. I really don't. That critique doesn't make sense unless it is an aesthetic one that objects to doing girly stuff instead of wallowing in manpain.
The point of my anology is not that icecream is bad or cannot exist, it's that it's weird to comment on soup by saying that it should be icecream.
Like i've said elsewhere, i stand by the take that "i liked DE except that it's meh to play as a gross dude" is literally the most relatable criticism of DE anybody could have. And i'm not alone in that, literally any woman i have introduced to the game was like "this is amazing, it's just kinda sad the protagonist is this ultra-divorced guy".
Alas you still cannot say to gamers "I would rather not play as a gross dude". In fact if you say "the protag is a gross dude, not interested" about any media people will go feral.
We have to face the fact that men are bourgeois.
I have no issue with that take. But that is only one sentence of the tweet.
The negative reaction to the tweet is that it, intentionally or not, comes off as criticizing struggling Estonian writers living in the wake of shock therapy for writing a gloomy game about the despair of post-communism instead of a saccharine apolitical game set in the west.
Why are these artists expressing themselves instead of catering to my tastes?
It's not how art works.
You cannot create a game by mixing "game concept" with "good writing" and "great design" together in a beaker. These are things that develop organically... if you're lucky.
Eh. I agree that DE's story is inseperable from growing up as a burned-out Marxist with substance abuse issues in post-soviet Estonia, that the entire gameplay organically grew out of the material reality of being underfunded and having zero people who had worked professionally on a video game before, and that the entire project was a hair's breath away from turning into the remains of Fortress Accident that we see ingame. And i agree that this is what made DE as impactful as it ended up being. It would not be the same without these biographic and economic factors.
But recognizing and respecting that does not change the fact that i still 100% feel the tweet you have presented for our ridiculing in a thread that is actually about misogyny among G*mers. Yes, this is now my hill to die on. Buckle
DE's origin does not change the fact that "Disco like" is an actual genre now. It also does not change that the conditions DE was made under have, by sheer necessity of how the endavour was funded and staffed, produced a highly viable workflow for indie gamemaking that is not just able to, but purpose-built to function with little more than a ton of text and cool concept art, which will allow a bunch of people to make games that would not have been possible before. We have seen that this is already happening and it will happen again, that way of making games is here to stay because it is one of the rare cases where you have an economically viable way of making a finished, professional-looking game that sticks very close to its original concept.
Also, i stand by the assertion that taking the sentence "a young witch trying to solve the disappearance of her neighbor's cat in a small village in the Alps" and reading it as necessarily apolitical and saccharine is inherently misogynist. It just is, i'm sorry. If you think that stereotypically feminine things are by their very nature unserious, vapid, infantile, frivolous, removed from actual real life problems worthy of consideration and a fair target for public ridicule, you have misogyny to work through, that's such a textbook example of how patriarchy discredits femininity.
It really isn't hard to make the cat-seeking witch in the alps pitch a political game or to make it gloomy and desperate if that is so important for a true Disco like in your opinion (which it isn't, it's important for Disco Elysium, not for the genre it invented). Just look at Night in the Woods, i bet the girl who wrote that tweet loved it and it's a pretty good cosmic horror take on the death of labor and the material conditions of the working class in Appalachia, yet it is entirely told by cute cardboard cutout artwork of gay animals.
Do you think if i took that alpine setting to combine Silvia Federicci's Caliban and the Witch and Thomas Bernhardt's hatred of Austrofascism and the group psychology of social control and ostracism in small, closed-off communities with a story about the Munich Soviet Republic, the persecution of communism under Hitler and how climate change destroys glaciers and would throw a couple t4t lesbians in the mix for good measure, it would have less impact just because it features cozy artwork about teenage witches and cats? Do you think the cute witch with the collection of potted succulent plants in her plushie-filed bedroom is taking the politics out of the game? Do you think the toe beans on a cat's paw being shown on screen make a story more superficial? What if that artwork is just the needed contrast before the protagonist finds the cat in a ravine full of the bones of people that got disappeared in the 1930s? What if that is followed by the eldritch abomination that has telepathically infected the community since its inception shambling out of the last remains of the thawed glacier to set its way too large number of compound eyes on the stars for the first time in 6000 years?
And even if we leave ideas like that aside, if the presence of cute girly things is inherently apolitical and offensive to you, then it becomes a political statement again. One that clears a very low bar for when something is political, but it's not my fault when people decide that girls are so horrible that their interests must be shamed to such a degree that they must be presented as the "see, women are having really bad takes as well" counterargument in a thread about the elaborate revenge fantasies of a literal fascist.
i hate to say this but that is the second most generic protagonist i can think of, right after the genius detective who is also an addict trope
I think there are much more generic protagonists our there.
Super soldier #4, every day man who's car broke down in weird village, isekai pervert, 'you are chosen one who will defeat a great evil', random Japanese teenager
The last 3 are just the same person.
is captain america really less generic than sherlock holmes? surely just based on the extra century alone there would be more holmes-types
It says literally nothing about the protagonist except that she's a witch, how can you tell if she's generic unless your argument is entirely based on your latent misogyny?
how about the part where the witch is ace ventura and lives in a small village in the mountains and is drawn in corporate memphis lol? but i guess i did make one mistake, which is that the setting becomes a lot less generic if the village sits above the treeline or is otherwise not super forested.
The first is a plot point that you've misrepresented to make it appear like a part of the character description, the second is a location, the third is an art style (that you have also identified incorrectly). None of these say anything about how her character is written. I know this is hard for you to grasp, but you are arguing about a character that you have made up to get mad at women.
is "detective" a different thing from "pet detective"? is the setting not part of what makes the story generic? is the artstyle not part of what makes the story generic? i actually think where you live is a very important part of your character, in fiction and in real life. i just don't see how "witch who lives in the forest and works as a pet detective" is any less of a character archetype than "drug addict who investigates murders".
Once more, you are making up the entire pet detective part to turn a plot point ("missing cat") into an aspect of the character ("works as a pet detective"). You do not know any of this from the post, as it does not specify. She could study in the big city, visit her parents over the semester holidays and learn that her neighbors' cat that she's known since highschool is missing. She could be unemployed and help out her aging neighbor from time to time, having bonded with the cat over this. She could be a primary school teacher or a mortician or a farmer or god knows what. BTW all of these would be more likely than a tiny mountain village having a pet detective.
I can't believe i have to explain this to you, but art and writing are actually different parts of the creative process. Generic art can't rub off and also make the story generic, it can only fail to pair the story with compelling visuals. The writing itself obviously remains unchanged by that. It will have less impact, especially for media illiterate people like you who do not understand what is happening in front of them and can only vaguely point to something being kinda off, but it still says nothing about the character. Unless you think that you can substitute looks and character as long as we're talking about a woman, ofc.
You also still fail to miss the entire point here. The quoted post does not wish for a different protagonist because Harry DuBois fills the played-out trope of "washed up, addict cop bitter about his ex", but because it's another game that forces women to play as a man. I found that kind of annoying about Disco Elysium at times as well. It worked mostly ok, because Harry in general and the addiction part in particular is extremely well-written, because the authors understand and expose harmful, dangerous aspects of cop psychology and how the RCM fits into the conditions in Revachol as a debt colony of the MoralIntern, because Alan Kurvitz is good at writing things like the call with Dora in a traffic accident way that makes it impossible to look away from the carnage and so on and so forth, but the fact remains that for a woman, it's a fairly normal thing to go "eh, another game that centers a hairy, angry dude" because video game history and media in general are full of that shit. I've seen enough of that for a couple of lifetimes, i find it hard to care about more and it's impressive that DE didn't only make me care about this story, but makes me recommend it to other girls and do letsplays with them. And every single time, every single one of them has my reaction, that the game would be better if it would center women more.
So i really do not get the hate for that post. Or i do, it's misogyny. What is pitched here is girly and pastel colored and has a cute animal, so it must be bad. I also don't see why a random woman on the internet is required to come up with a compelling female protagonist when she points any of that out. Seriously, why would you do that? Why does she have to be able to brainstorm a more original protagonist than the best written cop characters in video game history? Oh right, because for dudes like you, women have to either do that or shut up.
well no, it's because she criticized harry dubois for being generic (which he is). i guess i shouldn't have said she "works as" a pet detective but regardless of what she is as a job, she is a pet detective. the art style is a bit generic, but you're right that it's not really a character design thing. still, i didn't really get that she was complaining less about how generic disco elysium is and more about how much video games in particular are made by and for men. i probably should have thought about it from that angle.
Oh lol
Is that post not a bit
Didn't someone actually make Alp With DE recently? I could've sworn I saw it posted before.