- obviously there’s the fact that her critiques of DE are so unabashedly surface-level that you cannot tell if she’s actually played the game or read a plot summary/review of it.
- but there’s also the fact that she’s proposing a supposed improvement on what DE is with her own prompt, which in-and-of-itself is the lowest form of critique in my eyes–‘what if you had an entirely different idea?’
- and then the prompt itself is a doozy:
- she somehow found a way to both critique DE for being unimaginative with its scenario/having a white man protag and propose, in alternative, the absolute whitest possible scenario imaginable
- in the implicit shift from a grimy Eastern Europe to a comfy Western Europe, she’s managed to gentrify her scenario proposed in a critique about diversity
- she wants to keep disco elysium’s, unexamined by her, ‘wonderful writing’, while stripping it of all the rawness and deliberate confrontation that is at the heart of it that would conflict with the idyllic nature of her scenario and her stated opposition to griminess
- her idea of a more diverse story, if we’re taking it as she’s presenting it, is swapping a white guy with a white gal, which, I mean, diversity win, I guess.
- the fact that this is the most generic, safest-possible indie game idea imaginable. I could go on itch.io and find 50 of pretty much that game. this is the idea that like 50% of developers have when they’re thinking of a quick point-and-click game for a game jam.
i could go on, but the most scathing possible point I could make to this tweet is that this person is a BAFTA Judge 
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.
Interesting that that’s how the cards played.
I’m sure that OP would have had a problem with how much contempt the story and the girls cat would have had for her main character if the writing would stayed the same. Actually, the cat murdered klaasje and is an incel communist.