dang son lookit you, lookin gr8

And it certainly doesn't matter if it's like oh nooo the salmon are possessed by evil spirits and deep cut is actually liberating them (which has its own immense baggage of the colonial saviour trope but thats its own post)

Because at the end of the day, the entire structure of the gameplay is built around the genre conventions of indiscriminately killing members of a species that you have license to kill without remorse. Like, you can still find raiders fun, it really does look fun if you don't think about it from this angle and I don't want to assume anything about the folks who are enjoying it.

But, y'know, there is a reason these salmonids are designed this very particular way. There is a reason the developers chose salmonids for their horde single player for you to kill and not swaths of inklings

I know that people meme the shit out of the term "ludonarrative dissonance" but this problem of a narrative twist ending is an excellent example of this phenomenon: the story in your video game can say one thing, but if the game side of it forwards a different takeaway, then it doesn't often make for a very cohesive experience. You can say at the end that what you did in the game was Very Mean and Not Nice, but if the hours of fun and replayability depend entirely on killing mobs of an aggressive morally inferior race, whatever you end up saying about that race by the story's end is going to be dissonant with the actions of the game itself as a video game. In short, you are selling the game as worth buying because it is fun to do this to the enemies of the game. Whatever is actually said about them in the narrative conclusion doesn't...matter.

problem solving steps

what the fuck

that thing is eldritch

acquired a dark mode version just to see what it’d look like. oh my god. this map is gorgeous