Good detective fiction, as we’ve seen, can use the genre to make meaningful critique of the socially constructed nature of the law and the unstable identity of crime and the criminal.

Bad detective fiction is a vigorous defense of the status quo, a reification of the mandate that the Institution in every form must be protected at all costs.

Lacuna
Digitales, 2021

In selecting games for this, I’d purposefully skipped over the pseudo-noir and copaganda ones that were clearly just violence simulators and white male rage. They telegraph themselves pretty well so it wasn’t hard. But there were also some that looked like actual games that were still obviously in that “hardboiled noir cyberpunk grizzled man” category which I thought deserved a fair shake. I’d nonetheless been avoiding playing them for obvious reasons, but figured I’d finally dive on in. And I got exactly what I expected, to an almost comical degree.

Yet while there was certainly something farcical about watching this game live down to my worst expectations, in the end that can’t really over come how disturbingly sinister the thematic elements here are, especially in 2025.

As expected, you play as an emotionally stunted manchild, Conrad, who is such a piece of shit he refuses to answer his 14-year-old daughter’s texts and calls and has to be browbeaten by his ex-wife into giving the poor girl the time of day, which naturally is painted not as a dire failing as a human being, seriously what the fuck is wrong with you interact with your child, but a sad consequence of how hard it is being an important, hardworking MAN. I don’t doubt there are a litany of likeminded manchildren out there who can relate to this, but god it’s so boring. I do not care how sad he is about neglecting his partner and child, and even if I did, I still would have gotten bored of it approximately a billion of these stories ago.

I noted back in the intro post that it’s weirdly sinister how a genre founded by socialists has gotten appropriated by capitalist cyberpunk and copaganda, but another thing this game had me thinking about was how badly the “emotionally stunted manchild” milieu misunderstands an author like Chandler. The whole point of a detective like Philip Marlowe is precisely that he’s not emotionally stunted — he’s caring and empathetic and cares about doing the right thing, but lives in a world that’s cruel and mercenary. Like that’s literally the whole point, that the PI is solitary because he’s the only one that cares. Take the ending of the Maltese Falcon — the whole point is that Spade has fallen in love with Bridget, he knows and understands his feelings, but he also knows she doesn’t share them, maybe can’t, and the tragedy is that he’s a man full of feeling in an unfeeling world. This isn’t subtle!

These stories all act like they’re hearkening back to the Great Minds, but what they’re actually hearkening back to is a huge turn in the genre that happened in the 50s and 60s as part of a larger cultural shift that sought to reify gender norms, which included an insane uptick in violence against women and emotionally stunted men. This is the Mickey Spillane era. And while I don’t doubt there are games purposefully calling back to the extreme misogyny and violence of the 50s, I think the vast majority of them believe they’re following in the footsteps of people like Chandler and Hammett, and they’re completely wrong in a way I find utterly fascinating and baffling.

Because hot damn does this game hate women. More than I expected, frankly, and that’s saying something, because I very much expected it. All of the important “heroic” characters are men — there are token women running around, but the major characters are all (white and possibly Asian) men. And all of the characters representing “evil” organizations are women: the cop (more on this in a sec), the face of the mercenary organization that carries out an assassination and kidnaps your kid, even the only corrupt current employee of the FBI — all women. The only exception is CEOs, presumably because that’s a special man-only job. Every time the game needs to represent the shittiest people, it manages to put a woman’s face on it. And on the flipside, women are victims — I knew the instant the protag had a daughter he was treating badly she was being set up for a fridging, and yep, she’s almost instantly kidnapped. The sympathetic terrorist is just doing terrorism for his wife who is both pregnant and chronically ill, just in case we didn’t get that wives are sad and vulnerable. The women who turns off the security camera for the perp is a single mom. Women are evil and must be removed or vulnerable and must be protected, but that is all they can be and there is never an in-between.

One particularly illustrative example is when you find a young woman tied up in her apartment. She tells you she works for an escort agency but very quickly adds, “I’m not a whore” (a line so on the nose I double-checked it because even though I made note of it during the playthrough I was like, ‘Maybe I’m projecting and she doesn’t literally say that,’ but no, she does). Despite the fact that whether she has sex with clients is completely irrelevant to the story, the game instantly needs to clarify that she doesn’t, in a way that feels, to me, entirely directed at the audience. This is a way of indicating that she is a Good Victim, that we should protect and feel sorry for her. Sex work would be compromising for a woman in a way that would move her from vulnerable to evil and it is absolutely critical there be no room for error there. Despite the fact that we know who her John is, he never has to clarify anything — it literally never comes up again. It’s not compromising for him.

I also find it… illustrative that there seems to be no way to be nice to your ex without getting a romance ending. Simply opting to keep her in the loop about what’s going on with her kidnapped child and saying no to more romantic overtures nonetheless results in you dating, something which didn’t surprise me but nonetheless feels deeply tied to how this game views women.

The choice to make the ex-wife and daughter the only brown people on the main cast is related to this as well, I think. It adds to the power fantasy, which can now dip not just into the typical fridging but also a white savior complex. Women may need men for guidance, but brown women extra-need white men.

Lest you think they are the only brown people in the whole world, worry not! The rest live in the slums. I was struck instantly by how the first time you go to the poor district, suddenly the majority of the background NPCs are black. I guess despite the fact this takes place on some random planet somewhere in a galaxy far away, black people still have to deal with the effects of slavery in the form of intergenerational poverty. The game also goes out of its way to racialize the market in the poor district, describing it as being full of “fried rice” and “unidentifiable meat” (oh those Asians, so shifty and Asian even on other planets!). I guess white people being wealthy is just a natural law of the universe.

One other very interesting move the game makes is to have you be an FBI/CIA agent and not a cop. Someone involved clearly realized that by 2021 the optics of “cop” were bad enough that it might make the protagonist less sympathetic, so the game carefully makes him a less overtly hateful version of a cop and then repeatedly characterizes the police-police (as represented by a woman, natch) as incompetent. I’m fascinated by this as a way to have one’s cake and eat it too in terms of trying to support the status quo at a time when the status quo is increasingly unpopular. It’s so interesting to me that apparently a civilian investigator working fully outside the system was too threatening in some way, either by implying too much institutional weakness or by not filling some weird power fantasy. I am so, so curious to see if there’s more FBI/CIA expys in lieu of cops in these games.

More important than all this, though…

…

…

Under Hammett’s tenure, as early as 1946, the Civil Rights Congress established a bail fund to assist with releasing people convicted for political reasons. Hammett was one of three trustees […] the CRC was labeled as a Communist front group, and added to the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations.

[…] And so Hammett found himself in court in front of United States District Court Judge Sylvester Ryan, examined by Saypol. Saypol wanted a list of names of people who contributed to the bail fund, in the event that any of the donors might be harboring any of the fugitives. Hammett refused to answer.

In fact, he refused to answer every single question about the CRC, even ones asking him to identify his own signature on CRC materials, pleading the Fifth Amendment. After he gave his testimony, he was held in contempt of court, and arrested. He was fifty-seven years old.

Hammett served five months in a penitentiary in West Virginia, where he was assigned to clean the toilets. His stint in prison only worsened the tuberculosis he had been battling his whole life […]

Years later, in March of 1953, he was called to testify before the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee about his own alleged alignment with the Communist party, and also refused to provide information.

His health never recovered from his imprisonment. In his lifetime, his career didn’t, either — he was blacklisted for not cooperating with McCarthyists.

…

It is hard to overstate just how much Lacuna hates the idea of revolutionary change. No matter what happens, the game emphasizes that the worst possible outcome is the idea that a colonized people might try to fight for independence, that this would be a waste of life — though it’s never brave enough to specify whose. It makes me appreciate Paws of Coal even more, and Rowan’s argument that if you care about a cause, the sacrifice becomes irrelevant. It also makes me think of The Battle of Algiers, especially the scene where Lieutenant-Colonel Mathieu admonishes the French press for wanting to keep the colonial project ongoing but acting squeamish about the reality that it necessarily means killing Algerians. The game is the French press in that scene: it makes sympathetic noises about the deaths of the colonized, but balks at the idea of decolonization. The game is full of constant existential anxiety about the threat revolution poses. This anxiety is even metatextual — the achievements for the decision about whether to leak info to the rebels isn’t framed in terms of supporting or undermining a colonial state but purely in terms of whether you want to start or avoid a war. And even though it can’t articulate why, it is sure that this war must be avoided.

It goes deeper than colonial apologia, though. It hits almost every major imperialist talking point — the ostensibly right-wing terrorist cell is actually a left-wing false flag, a thing that doesn’t actually happen in real life. The game even emphasizes in flavor text how unusual left-wing terrorism is, as though this absolves its choices, as though this story sprouted up fully formed and wasn’t the result of conscious choices on the part of real people who opted to portray this thing that they are fully aware never happens as a realistic threat.

In a way that feels sickeningly familiar, it portrays the internal leaders of the independence movement as religious extremists who want to halt progress. The game further characterizes the forces supporting the independence movement as entirely motivated by selfishness and personal profit; we meet no one who is allowed to be doing this because they genuinely believe in it, a phenomenally cynical and regressive portrayal of civil rights movements.  The only people we meet are these supposedly duplicitous profiteers; true believers are never allowed to speak for themselves.

I think the game thinks it’s being evenhanded by having a reveal whereby 40 years earlier the imperialists manufactured a tragedy in the colony to reify their power. But a) this happened all the fucking time in real life, acting like it’s some shocking and scandalous one-off when “CIA topples governemnts” is a literal meme is insane and b) the choice to have it happen so far in the past that no one except one woman (natch) is still in the organization and she’s painted as deeply unlikeable and disliked by everyone right from the start is just apologia. It’s Japanese-style “can’t we move past this already?” nonsense with some “women are the real evil” sprinkled on top, and with no willingness to countenance the idea that the institution itself may be the problem.

So just to recap the game’s main theses:

• Left-wing terrorism is a real issue and right-wing terrorism is actually leftist false flag operations
• Anyone who says they support a civil rights cause is actually lying and just trying to profit
• Decolonization will be way worse for everyone than colonization, so it doesn’t matter what people actually want
• Cultural organizations that agitate for decolonization are dangerous extremists
• A UBI will just ruin the economy and AKSHULLY make people poorer (didn’t address this before but it’s there)

If this all sounds familiar, it’s because these are very, very old procapitalist and proimperialist talking points. They come up so often they we’ve already addressed them multiple times — in the Persona 5 review, for example. It’s not just regressive, it’s regressive in the most trite and tired way possible. It’s banal.

…there is also a game here. It’s not a good game, but it’s here.

My memories of the gameplay here will always be tied to infrastructure. So much time is spend waiting for elevators, waiting for trains, and opening and closing doors THE FUCKING DOORS WHAT IS WITH ALL THE DOORS. The best I can say is that all the waiting for the subway made me homesick but everything makes me homesick now, please save me from the midwest, so that doesn’t mean much. But god was there so much dead time.

The ‘investigation’ itself was extremely linear and straightforward and boring, involving no actual deductions or parsing of clues — the closest you get to having to think is that you’ll get lists of information where instead of names there are numbers and you have to match them to information you are given elsewhere; this is not deduction, it’s just annoying. You are given literal mad-libs style worksheets to fill out with information that was gained by talking to people in a straightforward fashion. The tutorial for this worksheet mechanic involved you temporarily playing as a tween who has to fill out a classroom worksheet, and it’s an unintentional ironic commentary on the mechanic itself — it has the feeling of busywork homework to check you were paying attention. You talk to people, they give you the mad libs answers, you plug them in, and then you go stand around infrastructure for a while before running into the next cutscene. It’s not exactly stimulating. Also the idea of the CIA standing around doing nothing until you hand in your homework is so deeply absurd. I don’t know why this is a diegetic element.

The one thing I will give the game is that the environmental pixel art is really nice. The environments are both detailed and unique — pixel art can look samey, but this is clearly bespoke and considered. Unfortunately the character spritework is of the minimalistic blob style, and the constrast is really rough — I’m not sure why they went with the super low res people on incredibly high-effort backgrounds but the art director needed to revisit that one. One of the persistent issues I had was that the NPC blobs were really hard to distinguish, and I would often lose not just important NPCs but also my own player character in the crowds, which was very annoying.

I don’t know how to end this post. I live in Minneapolis now, and my inbox is full of terrifying emails about what to do if my students are pulled out of my classroom by the secret police for the crime of being Somali-American. We desperately need a revolutionary praxis right now, and acting as though you can tell a story about how terrorism is all left-wing false flags and not white guys hopped up on fascism and then say, “It’s just a story,” doesn’t just objectively fly in the face of literally all the research we have about the very real effects stories have on people, it’s actively making a choice to perpetuate a way of thinking and being that harms other human beings. I fundamentally don’t know how to outro that.

I need to go play some of the games by furries.