Isn't she kinda missing the point that the protagonist is a middle-aged white guy that everyone else clearly thinks is a loser weirdo and is only given the barest respect because he's a cop?

oh boy... another game about a quirky girl and a cat

Also, how the hell is that concept going to carry DE's writing? What biting ideological commentary will there be in a cozy game?

"Whatever you do, do NOT look up the post. It's nearly four years old. Let it go."

Every other western indie game is a "cozy ghibli-inspired solarpunk farming sim with social elements where you can pet the doggo". Look, I get it, life sucks, and it's nice to have a reprieve. Yet, to borrow from the author: "do we really need another game" where you're a smol bean in a world of childish whimsy? I feel like that's a pretty well treaded path (if on the off chance you feel like you don't have enough, learn french; french indies are to childish whimsy what japanese indies are to sexual perversion).

Cheap, petty dunking out of the way, I would like to address some points:

I.
a) You can't take the narrative mechanism of DE and plop into a different game; Harry has a broken psyche, he's in the middle of restructuring his image of self (or if you ask my friend with DID, he's just fine, he just has DID and the character we play is a newborn in the plural system). You can grow and develop his personality over the span of a few days because the man just had a meltdown. Regular people don't talk to a skinhead and become a fascist 8 hours later, nor do they see a bust of fantasy-Marx and turn their entire personality into "you know what, ultraliberalism IS bullshit"

b) In a sense, the game is not about Harry. You have to insist in order to even find out what he looks like or what his name is, and you can just make something up completely in the latter case. If the game would be about "being a white guy" then it's self-defeating because Harry himself no longer wishes to be Harry, going back hurts him. Somewhere, at a fundamental level he knows "being Harry" has failed him and he's ready to grasp onto literally anything else there is.

II.
a) Reducing the diversity of the game to "main character is white" reaches bad faith territory for me. The entirety of Revachol is filled with weird and wonderful people, and we're able to glimpse into each and every one of their struggles precisely because we're not one of them, we're strangers, and we're only there in passing. If harry was instead a white woman protagonist but then all these working class and poor people were removed from the game then that would be a net negative for inclusion.

b) The core team that made DE is from the Baltics, Eastern Europe. You know, that part of Europe that endured sustained economic, political, and military aggression until it became a tattered shell, an open chasm, where the best and brightest left their homeland for the west in order to become nannies, and toilet scrubbers, and waiters, migrants treated like shit, so they could have a better life than living in the fucking wreck necessitated by the west's destruction of socialism. A story that to this day can only be told by allegory lest you be shouted down by idiots reassuring you, a native, that you don't really know how bad communism was and how Stalin nationalised his uncle's egg monopoly and that's why they had to move to Florida.

III.
a) The story is also, not a detective story in and of itself. The game's canon reveal of the murder mystery is indistinguishable from a joke ending; some commie dead-ender you never interacted with before killed your guy while under the influence of the fumes of an illusive psychic stick-bug. Columbo, this is not. The story just uses the framing of a murder mystery. By the end of it, you feel bad for the people of Revachol. At every point the game makes it hard for you to "focus" on the case because that's not the point of the game.

In case anyone felt bad about being mean to her, she's design lead at improbable.io, which "makes metaverse infrastructure and applications, as well as simulation software for video games and corporate use."

DE's 'insanely well crafted narrative system' and wonderful writing are to serve a point, to create impactful text/subtext through the mechanics that the developers were passionate about. This sort of backseat creativity irks the hell out of me because I promise you if the exact team that made DE set out to make some quirky witch cat game or something, it wouldn't have been nearly as good. Because the team were passionate about DE's subject matter and not passionate about quirky witch cat games.

The people passionate about cat witch games are making them and if they're not as good maybe that says something about the idea. You can't just take 'good concept' and combine it with 'idea i personally like' and get good art out of it.

The diversity point is valid I guess, but that only makes me want the DE2 idea of a pregnant woman in Revachol who gets yelled at by her fetus.

Ugh there's too many gritty detective settings these days! Has anyone considered making a comfy pastelcore game? I bet nobody has ever made a game like that before

She could just play animal crossing and stardew valley ffs

A village in the Alps has absolutely zero potential for any interesting writing because there is very very little mixture of political beliefs, backgrounds and class there.

If you want interesting writing then your setting is essential, it is the material base from which the conditions are set that influence all possible options to writing.

my immediate reaction was an audible "oof"

straight up morale damage

Ugh yeah I HATE all these generic fluffy indie games on the website itch.io!!! There are sooo many of them that I would love a list of them ~~to play~~ to ban! Please comment down below the worst offenders (especially if they're free)

I'm certain it has a basis in a terrible reactionary reflex but my reaction to her proposed "improved" story is just immediate visceral contempt. I just can't stand the kinda recent prevalence of squeaky clean stories about a euro witch that saves the day with the power of friendship, small animals, and being gay (but in a safe marketable way). I feel like this is the absolutely wrong opinion to have but I can't shake it.

I think we’re all giving her “critique” too much thought. Kinda seems like she just wants people to ask her about her completely original idea for a witch-cat-detective game, which I’m sure is very different from DE but also the same.

Edit: Like here I’ll do it too. “I really loved the writing and cinematography of Dune Part 1 and 2, but those movies are just white cishet savior fantasies. I would have loved to see a movie about a woman who leads a revolution to save their neighbor's cat.”

switch out the drug-fueled washed out deadbeat middle-aged white man for a yuppie young neo-pagan swiss white woman who has an outdoor cat problem, but keep everything about disco elysium the same

i'll be honest, I kinda want to see the shit-flinging the baltic commies can come up with for the western euro-nerds

DE but set in the Alps? We already have Pentiment, and it's still got a lot more flavor than whatever this woman is cooking up

I'm playing as a generic middle aged white man again, urgh.

To be honest I had only played as a naked green zombie prune with a club before this game.

"Undertale has a vast narrative possibility space, but getting to see all the dialog makes me feel icky so could you give me Undertale without that?

What makes the good bits feel so good is how they contrast to the grimy, uncomfortable bits. Even if you never take an evil rout in these stories, the fact that you could and choose not to is itself meaningful. But no. Apparently art should be smooth, quick to digest. Like how sharks are smooth.

I would like a video game version of The Cat Returns or Kiki's Delivery Service too.

it's been many years. how are we still not sick of white critiques of whiteness that begin and end at noting the presence of white people in fiction?

Yes. How many times its about a white guy?! We need a game about Hillary clinton and her brave stand against that cheeto. It should be Hillary combating russian agents. The game should have a morale system which increases only by voting blue. The game should be called "Its Her Turn".

I mean heck, I'd enjoy a cosy game with DE-style mechanics. It wouldn't be hard-hitting or whatever, but it'd be fun.

However, I don't think "generic" is a fair descriptor when the protag starts as a post-disco lover who spent three days partying so hard he blew up his possessions, his room, and his goddang mind

I recoiled at the "idea"

Like I really don't want to make anyone who likes the aesthetic feel bad but THAT IS FOR FUCKING BABIES, BE AN ADULT FOR GODS SAKE

I'm not even necessarily against the setting or concept, but this idea is intended for AN ADULT BABY YOU FUCKING BABY. Even if it was done with really tight and evocative art direction or something, putting it alongside DE makes it seem ten times more baby coded, you BABY ADULT go enjoy stuff for babies

EDIT: came back to double dip on my seething; why is it that in a medium typically dominated by media for adult men who are babies, the response is apparently that there aren't enough games for adult women who are babies

All amazing points, and also

Not only does the art style show she's probably thinking of like a white girl, it also reveals that the imagined game does not star someone who is stumbling through a fugue state wrestling with the disjointed parts of their brain

i seem to remember an ancient interview (probably on rps) where they discussed their main character choice and said that if they would've done a lady protagonist she would probably have been pregnant or have some other "condition"

Put cat ears on Kim and swap out Harry's neck tie for a witch hat, solved.

Yeah “let’s do DE but less grimy and more female-centric” isn’t the worst prompt in the world, a tad superficial but whatever. But my god that setting/protagonist they’re suggesting is like every cozy indie game on the Switch from 2021-2023.

The main character being a cop is fair criticism. Can you only tell a story with as deep and vast a look at a place and it's characters and as open-ended as Disco Elysium if you experience it through the eyes of a higher authority that has powers over other people? It's a big shame we'll never see a sequel by Za/Um because that seems like exactly the kind od challenge they'd have taken on.

Cutesy Witch Cat Detective Game could probably work as a game-within-a-game bit like the Suzerainty boardgame.