5 Games About Being a Listless Cog of Capitalism (and Having Hope Anyway)

It can be hard to have hope in the face of the world, especially recently, and a lot of media offers us a chance to escape from it. Video games especially are a genre built on giving players a feeling of empowerment by giving them the opportunity to make a tangible change, even if it only exists in the realm of the game. Some games, however, manage to offer empowerment without pure escapism, thrusting players into situations that simulate the feelings of powerlessness inherent in everyday life but giving them the tools and story necessary to create something that still feels hopeful, even under the veneer of realism.

Here are the best games about being another cog in the grand wheel of capitalism – but still maintaining hope.

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Night in the Woods

Mae is a recent college dropout who’s just moved back to her dying hometown. She, her friends, and the town are all stuck at an impasse. The world has seemingly left them all behind and it’s all they can do to cling on to what remains before it too can disappear. The game displays the decay of capitalism through its characters and setting but Mae’s connections to the people of the town give her hope and purpose. She reunites with her friends – Gregg, Bea, and Angus – and it’s through them that Mae starts to find a sense of purpose again. Over the course of the game, they try and unravel the mystery of a kidnapping. Mae and her friends can’t save the town but ultimately learn that they can save each other. In a quiet moment, Angus says, “I believe in a world that doesn’t care and people that do” expressing what is essentially the thesis of the game. Night in the Woods is not a game about saving the world because the world cannot be saved, maybe it doesn’t even want to be. But we can save others whether that be from themselves, the system, or the void.

Disco Elysium

This game follows an amnesiac drunken cop trying to solve a murder and fix his memory (both to varying degrees of success). The game starts quite literally at rock bottom with the main character waking up from a multi-day bender with no memory of anything, not even his own name. Despite his amnesia, he’s got a job to do: solving a murder in a forgotten, dying part of a massive city. The world of this game is bleak but we see human resilience in many of its forms here. In the main character’s attempts to do better at his behest, his partner’s trust in him, a union fighting for their rights, or even just a dicemaker quietly continuing her trade despite all the businesses that fail around her. The world of Disco Elysium is starkly real and overwhelmingly depressing but interactions with other characters make up the core of the game and these exchanges – in all their varied glory – are immensely warm in their humanity. We see the main character learn that you can’t erase the past, but you can keep trying. The existential threats are insurmountable, but it infuses players with a sense that acting against futility is not vain. They can still solve the case and excerpt that small victory over the world. They rage against the dying of the light. That act of defiance alone means they haven’t yet lost.

The Outer Worlds

Capitalism is a plague across the galaxy in this game, but we can fight it with enough friends (and munitions) at our side. The main character is awakened out of cryostasis on the ship, the Hope, and shoved into a galaxy eating itself alive. Mega corporations control absolutely everything and if the protagonist wants to have any hope of reviving the other people on the Hope and preventing the battle between monopolies from decimating the solar system. The Outer Worlds is all about building connections to those ends. By building up your party and your relationships with certain factions, you create your own force against capitalism (or can choose to become a shill for it). This game gives players the most agency to actually make changes in the world, but there’s still a sense that much of this is completely out of your control. You are still just one person and a ragtag team against a centuries-old, corrupt economic system. These forces will not crumble as you wish them to but with the help of your companions, you seek to exert change in the little ways you can. This game is wonderful at being empowering and disempowering at the same time, you are still one cog in the great machine of capitalism but if you’re stubborn, you can clog up the whole system.

Kentucky Route Zero

Kentucky Route Zero offers a quiet look at the dying state of Americana. This game is a meditation on rural life and its decay in the face of the shifting whims of capital. Our main character is a man named Conway trying to deliver a piece of furniture to an obscure location that he’s having trouble tracking down. In the course of getting this item to its final destination, he comes to know the area and the people around Route Zero, all more familiar to Conway than we get to see at the outset. We see that while the money has dried up, the humans haven’t, and they are hanging on however they can. We cannot save them but we can care for them. We can feel companionship with them in this forgotten place. This game is the quietest of all the ones on this list and the least definitive in its themes. But in a way, that helps to make it one of the more hopeful games, we get to see humanity thrive in the dark even when it seems all else has left. The game simply shows us the threads and allows us to draw our own conclusions, our own hope or hopelessness lies in what we as players seek to get out of these interactions.

Bioshock: Infinite

While the first Bioshock games also criticize capitalism, the inclusion of Elizabeth is what makes Infinite the right fit for this list. As with all these games, the forces of capital and society at large have forced our main character into dire straights. The game starts with Booker being tasked with finding Elizabeth as a means of paying off his debts. Things don’t go smoothly. Eventually, the two formally team up to try and escape the city of Columbia and unravel the conspiracy behind its founding. But by the end, we see Booker’s connection to Elizabeth become a source of strength, encouraging him to fight back. Booker (and the player) would act much more selfishly if not for their emotional connection to Elizabeth, and therefore their engagement with a plot against the status quo. We are empowered by our connections in this game and the result is that we are imbued with the will to fight back. Booker has been used, and the system does not want to let him go but, through his connections to others, he finds hope and the means to look at the world he lives in more objectively. There is hope for change here if there are others around to give you the courage and drive to pursue it.

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