The deeper I dig into the game, the more I get the feeling that Fascism was the most thought-about and best implemented ideology, and this is unsatisfying. Not in a "game's bad, nerd rant on codex time!" kind of way, but enough to devote a RL thought cabinet slot to pondering it. Because it does bring some implications in about the game as a whole, and coupled with some other stuff kinda ends up bringing the game down a bit.
The way it works is that the first misconception about how Fascism works in the game is that it's a muscleman's ideology, as Endurance is what prompts you to do it, and because Measurehead is a muscleman. The way it's actually implemented is *very* true to life and well observed. It's got more to do with "Conceptualization" and some of the psyche skills like Volition and Authority. What happens if you take a muscleman and become fascist is that fascism, as opposed to other ideologies, is tied to an actual mechanic in the game, namely drugs, and this screws you over.
Alcohol raises your physical stats, and damages your morale. The fascist thought Revacholian Nationhood, makes Alcohol raise your physical even more, but makes taking fascist dialogue options damage your morale. And your morale is likely to not be very high. It makes perfect sense that Measurehead would be an anti-alcohol zealot, and through him, Fascism gets another thought. He doesn't need alcohol, he went and made himself into what he considers an ubermensch. This is also why his fascist quest talk ends up being "strangely" reasonable. If the player goes muscleman, it becomes hard to roleplay a fascist because there's not much in the way of benefit, and the game's more likely to push you towards ultraliberal dialogues, because those give money, and money helps buy stuff, and stuff boosts stats that you're lacking in. Being a muscleman fascist mostly ends up damaging your morale a lot.
This means that the guy most likely to want to be a fascist is more of a physically and otherwise unremarkable nerdy type with more volition than he knows what to do with and more ambition than is healthy. Which is absolutely true to life, it is the go to ideology of frustrated dorks. High conceptualization, high volition, chip on their shoulder. In game this would make someone who uses booze to help them roleplay Hjemdallerman despite not actually being a muscleman. This is supported by game mechanics, reflected by other fascists, and it makes a fascist playthrough just blow every other ideological approach out of the water when it comes to implementation (and relevant content).
Where it leaves a bad taste in my mouth is that it kinda points towards the writers giving fascism a lot of thought, and fascist a lot of sympathy and deeper understanding. Yes, you've got Kim there to make sure to point out that being a fascist is contemptible, repulsive and sad, sure, but ultraliberals, communists and even moralists get nothing even close to this level of depth, mechanical integration and having thought put into them.
Moralists are just plain evil - they'll present you with a shit state of affairs, and tell you everything's fine. It's not wonder that Kim, ostensibly a moralist or former moralist, is visibly slipping towards the left (even if he's trying to cover it). Anyone who sees things as they are and cares more about society than his own baggage or situation in life is just going to be pushed towards the left, even if slightly. There's nothing mechanically appealing to being a moralist in the game, it's just a "don't get involved" option, and it lacks depth.
Ultraliberals in the game take a road between moralism and fascism, as they do in real life, where they take a shit situation, cross out effectively changing it as an option or even something they care to do, and try to make the best for themselves personally. Still, it's mechanical backing is very mystical - money just appears out of thin air if you follow the party line. It's unrealistic, straight up beneficial, and doesn't say much about who you are as a person. So it's like the opposite of moralism, moralism only says who you are (or rather, that you don't want to be anybody noticeable), but has no mechanical backing, and ultraliberalism is just mechanics with no psychology, because if money didn't appear out of thin air for them they'd all just be Plaisance (a deluded and very well written caricature of a kind of person you can meet in real life, where they're RL caricatures). And if anything other than roleplaying a hustler gave money when you clicked on options, people would be clicking that.
And then you have communism. And communism in this game is a mess. People think it's a very communist-friendly game, but that's mostly because communism is a demonized, taboo topic in the west, and just seeing it talked about, opted into and such is probably mind-blowingly exotic to them. The west, and US in particular, have made such a boogey man of communism, or even leftish socialism, that just being able to say the word or acknowledge that it meant something positive to someone feels like a big deal. And the way it was implemented in thought form is true to life - it's the only one of the ideologies that can point at the state of affairs, call it what it is, and then not say "go with the flow" or invent fantastical problems to go struggle with instead of the real problems (or excuses to not approach the problem seriously enough). Even if "mazovian socio-economics" isn't a solution, or isn't a solution you can single-handedly bring about to check it's efficacy, it makes you a "very smat boy making accurate models of the world".
The problem is that the mechanic (you get some XP for chosing hard-left options) is both lame (senselessly spouting hard-left slogans does not make you a "very smart oy making accurate models of the world"), and overshadowed by other "you get XP" mechanical options, and other than that you get nothing. And the leftists in the game don't really work - Manana's just an opportunist, Cindy's just an annoying kid, you couldn't identify them as "communists" the way you can identify subscribers to other ideologies. The students are accurate caricatures of the university left, sure, but they had to be added to the game at a later date just to give you something even resembling a communist to even have people to talk to for the quest. And Evrart is played up as a mob boss for too long and so hard that it makes someone trying to play a communist feel like the way to be a communist is to oppose HIM as hard as possible. Evrarts "reveal" is actually good, and it is very communist, because a true communist sees that the state of affairs IS shit, and that things won't change without a drastic shodown. Despite having every opportunity to fit into the system - you can initially see him as just another corrupt moralist or an ultraliberal hustler selling fake leftism - he ends up being an accelerationist, and this is nice, but feels like too little, too late.
So, communism actually gets the short end of the stick, and makes me feel like the writers actually get it a lot less than they get the other stuff (even if they write ultraliberalism off as a joke a lot, but, really, what else do you do with it?).
The part where this ends up making me feel kinda dissappointed is that the whole "I wanted a blonde, blonde woman left me, so I became a drunk and can't let it go" is the plot of every Yugo-Graad neo-folk song. It cheapens Harry a lot, it's extremely vulgar taste, and it plays into the whole fascist outlook hard. The story ends up not being about a possibly interesting guy going mad from the stress of dealing with a messed up reality, it ends up being a story of a guy who can't get over a blonde woman. Which, from RL Graad perspective is pretty much the pinnacle of a bottom-of-the-barrel-lowbrow-no-imagination-no-taste cliche imaginable.
The whole "blonde fetish" thing is just messed up in relation to Eastern Erope all on it's own. And with Klaasje also being fetishized by just about anyone who meets her, it comes across as saying more about the writers than it doess about Harry, as it seems to be taken very seriously, while being heavier roasting material than some of the stuff being roasted. Being this heavy into blonde women and ascribing them the ability to "compromize all your senses" or give you a decade long progressive breakdown spiral is... Just wrong. Stereotypically wrong.
Here's how it works. First thing is, Slavs, abundant in northern parts of Eastern Europe, are fairly often blonde. Celts, also quietly present in southern parts of Central and Southeastern Europe are also fairly commonly blond (or even ginger, quite a bunch of those between Austria and Yugo-Graad). So they're not exotic enough, to the point that being this much into them can make you come off as ethno-centric, with overtones you could get if you wrote a post-Nazi German obsessing over blondeness. But then, at the same time, obsessing over blond people is also a mark of colonial slave-mentality in Eastern European countries, especially southern ones, where women obsessively dying their hair blond ("to look like Germans!", rl quote from a lady excitedly explaining why she does it) can at times reach "black people feeling forced to straighten their hair" levels of disturbing.
So, a Harry who has "scored" an uptown extra-blond scandinavian-looking uberfrau, and had his life spiral out of control trying to keep her and can't get over her, and is drooling over a rather cookie-cutter Dutch magazine-cover girl, doesn't leave much room to place him anywhere interesting or exceptional. Or anywhere outside of what the game terms fascist, not completely inaccurately as it's often part of that mentality in RL, at least in parts of the world where the lead writer's from.
If I take that, and the effort that was put into exploring what the game calls "fascism", I get quite a bit disappointed with the whole thing. It's not that blondes can't or shouldn't be attractive, it's that that part of the game is taken waaaaaay too reverently. If you don't subscribe to "blond = pinnacle of perfection" mentality, you just can't take people drooling over Klaasje seriously, and you definitely can't see Harry's whole backstory as worthwhile. Any random shivers flashback has more nuance and worth in it than "guy fell for a girl who was blond AF, apparently mostly because she was blond AF, it fell apart, he spends the next 6 years trying to kill himself". And like, every time he doesn't clown it up, most people around him are either impressed with him, in awe, terrified, scared, he's all kinds of competent and interesting (if disfunctional), but he still only wants that one girl? What the actual hell, any number of things he's been involved with in his life would've been better reasons to fall to pieces over.
Just imagine if the story took place in the US, and Harry was a black guy, and his ex was a white girl. The whole thing in the game is pretty much the "kojko" equivalent of that, just written with no apparent self awareness on the part of the writers. If you play the game with your wife, like I did, all the Klaasje and Dora stuff goes well beyond cringe comedy and into unfunny uncomforable. A black protagonist having the same reaction to Klaasje, or the same story with Dora, would be a realy messed up and unrelateable racist caricature. And for us kojkos, it's even more messed up because it manages to hit both "where da white women at" and the white supremacist brown notes at the same time.
So there, stuff to chew on, and hope the next game features a Harry that turns out to be a less shallow person. Or, rather, if the next game's protagonist, be it Harry or whoever, gets constantly roasted about being a shallow, bi-curious semi-autist manchild, I hope he doesn't get roasted for everything except *THE* most shallow part of his identity. Becasue as is, Harry's story with his ex is not-quite-but-not-very-far-from a more lovingly written Racist Lorry Driver with more screen time, and inexplicably played for drama. And that's disappointing.
I also love how the game hits the right spots across nations, Baltimore to Marseille to Split to Talinn to places in China. Lot's of universal stuff in there.
