playingstory | The Political Compass: Devil's Labyrinth

Name: The Political Compass: Devil's Labyrinth
Status: Complete
Site: https://majestic12.itch.io/the-political-compass-deaths-labyrinth
Pairing: Gen
Description: A political compass test in the shape of a judgment sim.

This is a simple game with a simple premise. You're taking over for a devil guy who decides who burns in hell and who doesn't. You then have to deal with a small parade of people, helpfully color coded, who represent the stereotypes of their particular quadrant and either condemn or spare them. If you are not familiar with the political compass, it's a essentially model of political categorization which posits that everyone's political position falls on a grid for which there are two spectra, Social liberalism-conservatism, and economic totalitarianism-liberalism. The compass itself is popular among a particular population of people who tend to be about as far right as you can get and is thus sometimes associated more with bad faith memes than it is dispassionate sociology, but imo it's ultimately something or a Rorschach test where it's sometimes more enlightening to see where people think a given position lands on the spectrum than where that given position might actually land in an objective sense.

Anyway, I digress. If you don't really like the premise of the compass itself this is going to be an annoying game because it's essentially a casual personality quiz that places you on the compass in the end. The characters, being cliches of any given quadrant, are by necessity flat and just sort of unreal. It's hard for me to even say just how even handed the game might be because, like I said, ones reaction to categorization usually has more to say about you than it does about the thing you're reacting to. What I can say is that the game largely shies away from some of the more political extremes that each quadrant is scapegoated into representing. The pedos don't show up, nor do tankies, though Authrights do get an Antisemite for their representative. And the devs literally break the fourth wall to admit that their depiction of Libright is overly sympathetic.

Like the compass, this game is not going to go very deep into politics for real and like most compass fans, is largely facetious about the whole idea and in fact feels a little afraid to take politics seriously as something that's real and not just a map of how different people can be annoying. So if you're already a fan of compass humor this is basically that. If you don't like the compass, its memes, or don't think comparing the sins hippies and Nazis is in any way productive probably skip this.