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Notes -
I've got something that might fit.
Hardspace: shipbreaker
Mechanically an amazing game and very fun.
Story wise atrocious, and heavily panned in many reviews.
It's a story of workers doing a miserable and dangerous job for shit pay, so they rise up to fight their bosses by destroying a bunch of property as a form of strike. It would probably be a fine story as a movie.
The problem is it creates a total mood disconnect with the player. Not only do I enjoy the main characters' supposedly "miserable" job, I actually payed money to the developers to do this "miserable" job.
I think other games solve this sometimes mood disconnect by just having dishonest characters tell the player that what they are doing is fun and good. Like Glados in portal.
I ended up trying to make as little progress as possible in the Hardspace campaign, until I was done with the game and wanted to see for myself just how bad the story was. It's just cringe. And one of those things that you don't realize is an unwritten rule of video games storytelling: never directly trash your own video game within the video game. If you need to do so for storytelling reasons, get an obviously dishonest character to say nice things.
In between HW3 and Shipbreaker, we have two Blackbird Interactive games as answers here. A gold mine of cringe. Wonder what they'll do next.
An extraction shooter marketed to fans of boomer shooters.
Wait, Bungie has that covered…
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It also has the main antagonist (the company) alternate between being doing things that are moronically evil (killing you to obtain a genetic sample that they could get with a cotton swab ) and moronically nice but still presented as evil (apparently I get to keep the entire value of the things I disassemble? What?).
The other big problem is the total inability to see outside their own perspective. So of course the union representative is a brave, butch young woman with curly pink hair, who signs you up to the union without asking, and the corpo is a fat, lazy middle aged man who thinks that training and safety is a waste of time and brags about how he rose to the top and you can too if you work hard like him.
Ya I forgot how much I hated the union rep lady. For a while I just pretended the story ended with me ratting her out to the boss and her being fired.
I've met real people like her and they drive me absolutely insane. A self righteousness mixed with a self centeredness that turns every interaction with them into a lecture where you can't get a single word in.
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