Still playing Nine Sols

For most of this game, I've been unable to tease an obvious, pat, moral out of the plot. The Taoists correctly predicted that the Sols (technology-loving atheists) would become tyrants, which would seem to be a point for the Taoists. But the ways in which the Sols went bad seem to involve mimicking Taoists. There's a Sol who believes life is suffering, a Sol who emphasizes respecting your elders, a Sol based on the philosopher who dreamt of being a butterfly . . . And of course, the protag is a Sol who's trying to fix all this and still believes in the power of rationalism and technological advancement. There's a decent chance this will stay nuanced, something that rarely happens in video games that try to have a theme.

There's also a decent chance this will end up hammering in that the one deathist Taoist was right about everything and the Sols should have just laid down and died. In which case, fuck Red Candle Games in particular.

(no subject)

To follow up on what I said about games tending not to have nuanced themes: there's this game called Tooth and Tail where the theme is spelled out as "Revolution eats her children." Across the game, you keep seeing how Revolution eats her children. There isn't a point where it gets nuanced and goes "sometimes Revolution doesn't eat her children." And my experience is that themes in games tend to be like that. There are games where I largely agree with the themes, and there are games that let you choose your own ending that flips the bird to the themes, but I'm not sure what I would even point to as a game where the themes are flexible enough to allow nuance.

(I guess Persona 4 has nuance occasionally, but that feels like scraping the bottom of the barrel.)