Steam, lemmy and reddit are currently creaming themselves over a game which devs makes multiple really cringe "jokes" about slavery and exploitation. Read the steam page descriptions.
Those "pals" are clearly antropomorphised creatures being dogwhistle for humans. And if you read the game reviews, even the g*mers are not lost on that fact (just they love that):
It feels so 4chan adjacent that I'm looking at the last few friends in my contact list that I thought were on the level like "how do you not sense this? is your nose broken? Are your eyes sightless?" I don't like having to actively weigh and question how much my last vestiges of irl social contact are worth/whether it's worth having that fight over their unnervingly 4channer-adjacent slop.
Even worse is people keep justifying it with 'well Game Freak doesn't try/innovate/QA check anymore' but that... That shouldn't justify gleeful-slavery frenworld. Cassette Beasts is right fuckin there, as is Tem-Tem. (Neither of which really moved me personally, but that's beside the point.) The more I mull it over the more it genuinely pisses me off. Absolutely, I'd love an engaging, lore-heavy monster tamer alternative to Pokemon with the way Game Freak's been handling the franchise lately, but this one should've been sniffed out and rejected from the jump, I feel.
what the hell did i just read?
I wouldn't really say this is 4-Chan adjacent though? 4-Chan made a knock off pokemon game in the past, and it's about as bad as you'd expect. I'm seriously starting to think I'm playing an entirely different game to everyone else here, I just haven't seen the stuff people are upset about. The text of the game is very edgy, but the gameplay is just fairly generic. It could maybe be a statement about video games and pokemon in general maybe, but I wouldn't even give them that much credit. The writing just feels lazy, to try and be edgy for edgy's sake, but the gameplay doesn't at all, it feels more tacked on than anything else. It's barely in the game.
But again, maybe I'm not seeing the same thing other people are and I'm not entirely sure why I'm missing these things if they're so obvious to other people who have played it. This isn't me saying "everyone else is wrong" rather, it's me asking "Why am I not seeing this thing other people are seeing?"