[The goose-step] is simply an affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face. Its ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is saying is ‘Yes, I am ugly, and you daren't laugh at me’, like the bully who makes faces at his victim. [...] Beyond a certain point, military display is only possible in countries where the common people dare not laugh at the army.
—George Orwell,
England Your England
I've enjoyed a fair few strategy roguelikes in my time.
Balatro1 is a go-to stim toy during Zoom calls or long travel, I've sunk an ungodly amount of time into
Slay the Spire 1 and 2
2 , and enjoyed the ludicrous language-Calvinball of
Cursed Words. But in the past few days, friends and I have been captivated by
Pronoun Palace, which pares down its mechanics in order to say something in a way that none of these other games are trying to.
To be clear, that's not a knock on them -
Balatro doesn't need a story, it's a beautifully timeless box of whimsy.
3 Slay the Spire has an intriguingly odd fantasy style, and the sequel adds a slideshow-narrative and some space-fantasy elements with its cunty alien prince;
4 adding any more would just tie itself in knots. In the delightful Muppet pastiche of
Cursed Words, the dark machinations of the Secret Syntactic Society are just "brainstorming new ways to cheat at Boggle."
Your first run of
Pronoun Palace opens with a letter from the government:
Wilson Nguyen,
You have been found to be in possession of illegal pronouns. For public safety, your pronouns were confiscated from your person at 3:15 this morning by the New Police. We expect this shall improve the quality of your work performance. Recall that language is the enemy of truth.
—The Bureau of Information
So you settle in for a dark-comedy retelling of
1984 with a style somewhere between
The Binding of Isaac5 and
Homestuck - you fight some quirky enemies who menstruate on the board, whack you with yaoi paddles, and douse tiles in Mountain Dew. How whimsical.
And then you die and unlock the second playable character: a child with a giant hole cut out of his chest, directly based on the cover of the transphobic screed
Irreversible Damage. His opening cutscene uses that phrase verbatim. His special ability is to hole-punch tiles, then use them as spaces to play multiple words per turn. It's a very strong power.
And so, the game shows its hand as a fine example of
Dark Woke Neo-Edgelordism - it is well-aware that the word 'pronoun' is a bitter cultural punchline by now. It knows the exhaustion of grinding out any value at all from a government with utter contempt for its citizens. The Party turns people into liquid brains and pooltoy-cops and bloodbags for their own clones, but letting you have some titty skittles is just
beyond the pale.
There's certainly strategy to be had here, but the mechanical focus is kept tight. Playing actual
words in
Cursed Words is often a losing game, and you'll eventually start making absurd chains of wildcards that cannot
possibly cash out to real words - any plausible set of English phonemes will do.
Pronoun Palace is much stingier with wildcards, keeping a tight focus on picking actual words from a board of often-dangerous tiles. Sure, it would be
funny to yell
FUTANARI at the bureaucrat who put you through Hell, but can you
afford to say it?
6 Language is a minefield, and if you don't step carefully you'll end up dead in a ditch.
The mechanical tension and horrific worldbuilding aren't at odds with the comedy, they're entwined. the Party is flailingly pathetic in the way that all authoritarians are, but that makes them more nightmarish - they can ruin your life for years because they can't get their paperwork straight. As
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tresfoyle put it,
The way it talks about controlled opposition and the system's ability to absorb critique does feel like the Party's corncobbing about its inability to really manage dissent.
"We're definitely not mad about the juggalos who keep printing and circulating all this yaoi samizdat. Actually we meant for them to do that."
It feels very much like a deliberate reassessment of the Orwellian nightmare scenario with, y'know, going on 80 years of observation of How All That Shit Actually Went through a fairly sober lens, which is amusing given how arch and hyperbolic it all is. Orwell could not have anticipated "Anhui and Lanzhou criminalizing danmei web serials specifically to garnish the profits in hopes of balancing the provinces' budgets."
In the darker moments of The Current Era, I've kept going because my ego will not let me be taken out by the most tedious "why isn't there a STRAIGHT pride month?" motherfuckers alive, yet them being in positions to write policy is no less horrifying. I reject their demands for dignity just as much as I reject it for myself - show your respect by playing alongside me in the gutter.
This is a game by and for people who come home from an exhausting day of being queer in public and
crave an art culture with no interest in defending or explaining itself. It is
gleefully gross, erotic, and Extremely Online. Multiple enemy designs come from Porpentine's stories.
One of the best songs on the soundtrack is clearly sampling
Ain't It Funny7. The age regressors and bunnygirls have the alien-brutalist aesthetic of
Half-Life 2's Combine empire. It is locked the
fuck in to its artistic vision, and it's been delightful to see people realize how much they've been wanting this flavor all along.
It's been getting a steady stream of patches since launch, mainly bugfixes and internet-poisoned additions to its dictionary. I'm curious about what DLC for it might eventually look like, but it might just detract from the sharp, tight package we've got now. One way or another, I wish the developers the best and I hope this puts them on the map to make even wilder shit.
2. Right before I started writing this post, I had a wonderful Regent card-generation run with the best possible Colorful Philosophies pull of Defect cards: Turbo, Smokestack, and Flak Cannon.
3. I think the only thing conclusively dating it to within the past decade is one money-producing joker called "To The Moon".
4. I like how the Regent's cards suggest that he's only funny and pathetic while he's deposed, and the moment he has an ounce of power he becomes a genuinely nightmarish tyrant.
5. Apparently the devs are straight-up veterans of Isaac's modding community, which explains a lot.
6. Using a word finder tool makes it easier but by no means trivial - you've still got to consider status effects, optimizing crits, and balancing attack and defense. And at a certain point I feel I do better without it, like how fighting the Last Judge without tools will teach you a lot about its attack ranges and timing windows.
7. Pedantically you could say they're both sampling Wervin', but just demographically I'm almost certain the composer found the riff via Ain't It Funny.
