i could not be trusted to make this game because my immediate thought is that the game advertises and markets itself as what op intended but steadily and then rapidly becomes very clear that instead of a cozy cute cottagecore “mystery” the story SHOULD be about the blatant corruption, cruelty, systemic oppression, and persecution and bigotry of her neighbors, but the main character is desperately clinging to the original genre of omg cozy cute and cottagecore because she feels overwhelmed by the potential responsibility to enact meaningful change rather than feel-good aesthetic positivity, thus becoming actively complicit in the town’s crimes through her not mere inaction but in fact conscious choice to decide that she will be the protagonist of a cozy cute genre game rather than a story which might challenge her preconceptions of the world and the state of her own community.
Honestly, good impulse. I have no idea how you could recreate Disco Elysium’s “wonderful writing” if you had to rip out the politics. They’re kinda central to the game’s themes!
Even then, I’m not sure how well that would work. Revachol has cops and libertarians and unions and fascists and communists and militias and churches and secular moralists corporate conglomerates and urchin gangs, and the only reason it can hold so many groups with such diverse opinions is because it has a lot of people.
A small mountain village is just too small for that kind of worldbuilding. At most, it might have one egalitarian-pantheist and one dwarf supremacist who get into barfights most Friday nights, no matter how often the mayor and policeman scold them. The scale is completely different. Everyone knows everyone, so people with extreme beliefs either need to un-extreme them or keep their politics away from “polite society”.
You can write stories in small villages, but you can’t write them like Disco Elysium. “Wonderful writing” isn’t fungible like that.
thats weird because ive lived in plenty tiny villages and their worlds may not be as wide but they sure as hell run plenty deep enough for compelling narrative storytelling.
everyone welcome @jirnkirks to the apparently EXTREMELY exclusive club of “people who saw this post and Actually Got It”
