Prayer of the Faithless

[i]Truncated for character limits. Full review at [url=https://www.dragon-quill.net/prayer-of-the-faithless/]Dragon Quill.[/url] Comments are enabled there.[/i] The most obvious thing about this game is that it is incredibly, incredibly grimdark. The world is in the middle of a slow-motion apocalypse, but there is no Chosen One around to save it, so everyone is resigned to futilely pushing back the encroaching doom until humanity is finally snuffed out. Now, I say [i]grim[/i]dark instead of dark because, well, the existential horror of the setting doesn't seem to actually [i]weigh[/i] on anyone that much. The cadets training to be the last bastion of defense against humanity's inevitable destruction still make time for petty high school cliques and bullying, and despite their leader being borderline fascist the protagonist is able to get away with petty pranks and constant, flagrant disrespect for authority -- until suddenly he can't and he's going to get EXECUTED for backtalking the king, but actually don't worry his friend in high places pulls strings to bail him out because we can't actually have consequences for the protagonist, it's not like this is supposed to be a dark story or anything. ...Let's back up so I can explain the plot. The world is being consumed by a supernatural mist called the Fog that spawns monsters and slowly kills everything it touches. There used to be oracles who could see the future, but after the Fog appeared they all lost their powers -- except very recently, an oracle suddenly delivered a prophecy that a revenant would bring ruin to the world. One of the two protagonists, Aeyr Wilder, becomes that revenant after dying to a monster and being resurrected, whereupon everyone decides he's actually an insane demon wearing Aeyr's face and has to be killed, despite all evidence to the contrary. You can probably see where this is heading: it's a self-fulfilling prophecy because Aeyr decides that if everyone hates him he'll become the monster everyone thinks he is. Meanwhile, the second protagonist and Aeyr's only friend, Mia Alacruz, becomes leader of a band of refugees she must lead to safety after they are cut off from civilization by the Fog. The writing is characterized by some pretty extreme tonal whiplash. Once the plot gets moving, most of the main characters do treat the situation with the gravity it deserves, but Aeyr and his team never stop acting like quippy, juvenile, and unreasonably optimistic YA characters. It makes it really hard to take Aeyr's claims he's oh-so-oppressed seriously when he doesn't act any different from your average real-life teenage brat. The Big Shocking Reveals are similarly edgelordy, and almost universally revolve around everyone being Stupid Evil or just plain stupid. As an example: The fascist commander discovers that humans become immune to the Fog if implanted with magic artifacts, and moreover that willing subjects have a 100% success rate while unwilling subjects have a 99% failure rate. Instead of [i]telling people this[/i], in which case she should logically have a queue the entire length of the city, she keeps everything a secret and continues torturing unwilling subjects for no reason. Why? Why would anyone do this? This isn't even necessary evil, this is just plain stupid evil. The story is overall framed as a conflict between individualism (on Aeyr's side) and collectivism (on Mia's side), and though the developer claims there is no "true" or "correct" ending, I see a very clear bias towards Aeyr: Aeyr betrays Mia first, but Mia forgives him and this is brushed off by the narrative; when Mia betrays him later (for a much, much better reason), that's treated as an unforgivable offense. The story is also incredibly misanthropic: the masses are consistently depicted as selfish, overemotional idiots who never listen to reason and descend into panic and violence at the slightest excuse, and anyone who tries to be any kind of ruler is inevitably corrupted by power and forced to commit crimes against humanity to appease these monsters. (Also, hive minds are bad.) There are a few token attempts to claim Aeyr bears some of the blame for his ostracization by being a childish raging ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ to everyone constantly, but this never goes anywhere, while Aeyr's accusations that Mia has become a fascist (by, uh, not wanting civilization to collapse) are proven objectively correct by the narrative. There's also a disturbing degree of monarchism throughout the whole thing. Both of the two societies we see are ruled by bloodline monarchs and are shown to fall apart as soon as they die because no one can conceive of any other form of governance. One of the monarchs is shown to be evil and the other incompetent, so it's at least not depicting monarchs as objectively better, but did we really need this? I get that monarchies are a staple of fantasy settings, but if you want to provide social commentary on modern society you need to accurately reflect modern society. Vanessa is already the de facto leader of Asala at the start of the story so nothing would have to change by making her de jure, and making Vergio a democracy would at least lend some credence to the claim they're a slave to the masses instead of their emperor being the only monarch in all of history who places the peasants' desires over his own. Additionally, I feel I should note: The only dark-skinned characters are the magic mutant people with psychedelic hair, and the characters list their dark skin in the same breath as the impossible hair when talking about how they're Weird and Other. This is a bad trope and fantasy authors really, really ought to know that by now. Dark skin is a normal human trait and should be treated as such. The whole story ended up feeling very post-hoc to me. Its argument appears to be, "Taking it as a given that people are terrible, asking people to make sacrifices for the greater good is wrong." Except, uh, no, I do [i]not[/i] take that as a given, nor should I. People are not inherently unreasonable and do not inherently desire fascism, nor does every single person in a society fall to mob mentality when it strikes. There were German citizens who fought and died opposing the Nazis. Donald Trump did not get a majority of the vote -- nor did Hitler, I feel I should point out since everyone loves to trot out that he was democratically elected. Humanity is not a monolith; "society" or "the collective" is always made up of individuals who make their own individual decisions, and it is not fair to lump everyone in with an evil vocal minority. It's a shame, because I feel there is a lot of value here. On paper, I think the story is a very good one -- the struggle between collectivism vs. individualism is an important question, as are questions of what to do in the face of existential risks and how to balance ideals and reality. The story is very genuine, and I found parts of the Judged and Tired endings genuinely touching. But it just crumbled in execution, largely I suspect due to the creator's overwhelming bias towards individualism; the story was supposed to weigh it against collectivism, but it could never do that fairly. Maybe that is an intractable problem with the way we tell stories, which present an inherent divide between The Main Characters Who Matter and the The Background Characters Who Don't? It's hard to care about the collective when they are a (literally, in this case) faceless mass that speaks in one (whiny) voice.