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finally, the lesbeeans

okay but seriously this game was short and sweet and I really wasn't sure what I was getting into but I thoroughly enjoyed it

The art was adorable - especially fond of the sloth babushka in her head scarf and the dog in his kippah/yarmulke - and the coffee minigame was cute and fun! I think it just suffers most from its extremely short length, especially given the emotional gravity of the story it wanted to tell. As one comment mentioned, there's no "navigation" of the shop's corporate takeover, the plot point is just over in the blink of an eye - and so, too, is much of her struggle with reconciling her father's love of the community to his by and large abandonment of her. It seems like the game wants her - and the player - to forgive him much too fast, and as such I don't think the story 100% works. The coffee minigame also apparently doesn't affect the story whether you do well or not, so that's another factor. Overall, it's a very cute test game, but doesn't quite feel like a finished product.

It was all right, but very brief - the art was good, and it was nice to see Silver Thread's duo again, but I don't know if there's enough to it for me to totally recommend it (unless it ends up playing heavily into Silver Thread Deux, which I haven't played yet).  Overall, it seems more like a test game for RenPy's functions on the part of the creator.

The art is very nice, especially the background. However, in regard to everything beyond that, I would not call this a good game. So why is this in middling? Well, it's the rare game that has a MSTK3000 quality to it. The way in which it is not a good game is so funny to me that I almost want to believe it was satire.

To start with, my reason for not thinking this game is good is not because I think the "woke mob" is "inserting their agenda into my apolitical video games" or some bullshit lmao. Brother I am the woke mob. I am all for a game talking about the oft-unethical ways in which illegal immigrants are captured and rounded up, especially children, who we've seen proof are sometimes separated from their parents and maltreated as if they bear the burden of a crime they had little choice in committing - a crime that very often speaks far less to moral character and far more to desperation. The problem I have with this game is that the guy trying to prevent illegal immigration into Britain, Churchill (hilarious name choice), is the most baby-punchingly, puppy-stompingly evil caricature of a villain I have encountered in a very long time.

Am I well aware that law enforcement frequently attracts shitty people, and that even the people who aren't shitty are extremely often driven by the violent toxicity of the system to do shitty things? Absolutely! I'm a black person in America, for Christ's sake! Do I think that everyone in immigration enforcement is lighting their cigarette with a lighter they stole from you, and monologuing about how illegal immigrants are like pigeons because they're filthy,  swarm the cities, and "we don't like them", and laughing and bragging about your reputation in the "lefty newspapers" as "the kidfisher" because of the belief that you like dragging children out of the water and then throwing them back, while swigging a ridiculously ornate Scotch bottle like a goddamn Bond villain? Probably not bestie! And I cannot express to you enough that his actions get even more cartoonishly evil immediately afterward. There was a part in one of the endings which was so absurdly over-the top that I actually laughed out loud. What could have been a quiet, foreboding story about hard choices instead becomes unintentional high comedy. It's great, but not for the right reasons.

Don't get me wrong. I think some of the things above could be done halfway-decently. There are movies - Paths of Glory, for instance - that have ridiculously evil characters and still work. But it is both the presentation of this game (particularly its very short length, and the fact that it comes out as a goofy villain monologue) and especially the utterly bonkers ending that strain credibility to the point of breaking. But the game was made with good intent, and that's always better than strawmen and questionable writing in games with bad intent, so if this game managed to change anybody's minds then hey, maybe I'm the idiot.

(Final note: I could not help but notice that the creators of this game both have French names. I don't know if they really are French, but if they are, that would just make this even funnier to me, because it makes this game's depiction of a British guy feel like 18th-19th century war propaganda. Napoleonic Wars 2: Electric Boogaloo)

(Final final note: I scrolled the comments and apparently a number of lines in this are just straight up "borrowed" from Inglourious Basterds. It turns out that taking lines from a full-length movie directed in an over-the-top style does not work in a five-to-ten-minute game with an otherwise understated atmosphere.)

Unfortunately, the writing kinda put me off this one... there were a lot of typos, and the dialogue also felt much too modern at times for the era, nor did the characters compel me particularly.

The comment by red autumn - "tbh, I feel like Emma 'If I can't dance, it's not my revolution' Goldman would not be overly concerned about small pleasures under capitalism..." - probably put it best; because though I really liked the art and aesthetic of this game, I was frustrated with the actual writing - mainly the ending, in which Goldman criticizes the player/creator (since the player more or less seems to play as the person who made this game) for supporting harmful corporations by buying from Amazon. This seems... both unfair and out of character for her. 

It's unfair to blame any individual for participating in capitalism, because as the phrase goes, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. The creator of this game, as well as its players, should not be blamed for purchasing from a corporation in an environment that allows that corporation to become so dominant that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to live without. But it's most frustrating because I'm sure the real Emma Goldman was well aware of this - she spoke of how it was impossible for any person to be free in a capitalist society, and with that naturally comes no freedom to consume ethically. I'm no expert on Goldman, but I do know that the whole reason her paraphrased quote that red autumn mentions above became so inextricably tied to her in the eyes of history is because it represents one of her strongest ideals, controversial with other activists - that wanting to revolt against the system shouldn't mean you must deprive yourself entirely of joy in the life you currently have. So not only is this ending unfair to the players and the creator themselves, it's unfair to Goldman's memory, too. Really, I think Goldman would be sad and frustrated about the current state of the world, like she was in her time - that in the eighty years since she died, there are so many terrible things that haven't changed. But I think she'd blame the perpetrators of this capitalist society - the Musks and the Bezoses, the Wal-Marts and the Apples - rather than its subjects.

I remember this game really epitomizing the kind of writing where you can tell the author has memorized every single military strategy and the specs of every weapon and vehicle in the entire war but focus on this over actually telling a compelling story with human characters. That kind of feels like what's happening here - you are not terribly motivated in what decisions you make, because you feel no real urgency or investment in the narrative. The typos don't really help in this regard...

The number one thing you should know about this game is that despite being on the WWI tag, and despite mentioning the "Kaizer", it is in no way a WWI game. This is a WWII game. The country of this game is so blatantly a thinly-disguised fictionalized Nazi Germany that I wonder if the creator didn't mix up the two wars. The art's actually pretty good, but beyond a single line at the beginning of the game in the main character's father's letter where he says to value love over violence, the writing is... not - and when it's a kinetic novel with no choices, gameplay, or interaction beyond clicking to advance the story, writing is quite literally everything. Here, though, it's very, very on the nose, and the characters aren't terrible deep, and the whole thing feels a little like a 14-year-old who just learned about Nazis for the first time and wanted to make a game about how they were bad. The ending twist was sort of neat, but I wasn't invested enough in the rest of the story for it to be worth the journey there...

I was really excited for this one, but the writing unfortunately just wasn't up to par with my hopes. There were typos, I didn't really connect with the characters, the ending was abrupt (and also glitched? a character died in my run but it said he survived the war with a wounded leg??), and by far the strangest part was the main character speaking in a Southern American accent. Even though he's Canadian. Huh? Is this meant to be shorthand for him being from a small town? I'm not Canadian myself, but I asked my friend who is, and she said she's never heard a Canadian say "y'all" or "ain't" as part of a typical accent there, unlike in the Southern US. This was especially weird, given that Private Bell was a real person, who I suspect didn't speak like that...

I'm not really sure why the steampunk element was in this game other than the ticking clock as an aesthetic...? It didn't come up much, to the point where I often forgot it wasn't just a regular WWI game, and the ticking clock still could have applied even without it. Either way, the writing had typos and I wasn't terribly attached to the characters from it, so I don't really recommend it.

Well, this one did thankfully not call the German forces the Axis Powers like the other one did, but it had the same spelling mistakes and lack of compelling writing.

The writing's not very compelling and has errors in grammar and such, but probably most glaring is that at one point it calls the Germans the "axis". They were. They were not the Axis in WWI.