Still playing Nine Sols

[feotakahari]

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.