Remember the whole shitstorm that brewed following the discovery that Bethesda’s Starfield contained the option for players to select their character’s pronouns as he / him / they?
Among other things.
With Liberal pricks such as The Act Man stunning and bravely defending the inclusion of pronouns in Starfield, by mercilessly attacking those who thought otherwise, though of course the real storm didn’t actually start until users made a game mod for Starfield that removed the supposed “minor” inclusion, the mod in question was swiftly banned because freedom of speech only applies to game modding so long as you’re not sexualizing women or removing inclusive pandering.
And the takeaway for today’s story is that you are not forced to update your games so long as you pirated them.
Indie games have risen in both quantity and popularity in recent years, but of course the saying goes that “evil cannot create, only destroy” is most certainly true as majority of these so called indie games are more often than not “inspired” by popularized gaming trends and franchises, such as rougelites and metroidvanias.
Sometimes the indie games themselves are basic life simulators with neutral ESG friendly art styles, such as “My Time at Portia”, “Dinkum” and Ooblets.
Lunacid is another indie title that’s essentially its own rendition of other games, with the developers, Kira LLC describing the game as being inspired by classics such as Shadow Tower and King’s Field.
It’s a first person dungeon crawler with timey low poly aesthetics, while not exactly original as most indie games aren’t, it’s certainly a lot of good fun alongside being a retro throwback.
Or at least it was a lot of fun, you see majority of these indie titles are ushered onto the Steam store in an unfinished or work in progress state, Lunacid is no different with its official 1.0 release only just going live on October 31st, leaving early access behind has saw many newly introduced features, fixes and game changes.
The other joy of purchasing an in-progress indie title is that you’re ahead of the curve when it comes to the games overall discovery, an early bird of the games fanbase as you get to watch the game grow as it hopefully moves closer to its full release, or in the case of Lunacid, those hoping that the developers wouldn’t be pushing progressive agendas (which is all the more common for indie games nowadays) just got scammed.
I’m not quite so sure the pronoun addition was meant to be utilized in such a way.
Patch 1.0 for Lunacid has forcefully introduced character pronouns in a game where identity politics doesn’t make sense or even belong for that matter and naturally players are pissed.
As the game was in early access for ages, the inclusion of identity politics in the full fledged release means consumers are shit out of luck if they wish to refund the game months after purchase. But of course if you mentioned you would like a refund on the forums you’d be dealt with personally.
Because a lot of players rushed to the game’s Steam forums en masse to share their displeasure of this forceful pandering inside the latest update, only to mostly suffer swift exiles from the games community forums under the pretext of being transphobic, because of course any and all criticism against inclusivity and identity politics being forced down the players throat is clearly transphobic and hate speech.
The developers themselves even admitted to banning outraged users on the forums for unjust reasons, but apparently that wasn’t their “intention” apparently. It would seem that they’re simply trying to eliminate the outrage mob for their game by any means necessary.
Because the inclusion of gender pronouns in Lunacid wasn’t a decision made to actually be inclusive, more rather the developer themselves wanted the attention, they did this simply out of malice, to simply incite outrage regarding their game. Rather than allowing player expression it was a simple politically motivated addition.
“I’m adding them. Just to make people mad.” – Kira
Just for additional clarification, following the 1.0 update Kira had to rush in with a game “event” statement to address some of the complaints regarding the latest update and the inclusion of character pronouns.
Which obviously didn’t go over well as it confirmed what was already previously stated by Kira on Twitter.
In all honesty judging from the questionably hideous sprite artwork featured throughout Lunacid I am not all that surprised that Kira happens to be non-binary, because it certainly shows in their work, which just happens to be a flashy inspiration for earlier long forgotten From Software titles.
Truly a shame because it’s such a fun little game, however I imagine that the next update for Lunacid will remove the pronoun text file completely, essentially barring players the ability to remove the addition outright.
If you wish to play Lunacid without remorse and or funding politically motivated activists, you can always pirate the game instead like a true gamer would.
