Future? No Thanks! is a jolly and acerbic open world city game from seasoned satirist Paulo “Molleindustria” Perdicini. It’s about a bitter old boomer trying to enjoy his final day in an ecosocialist paradise. There’s a demo on Steam that gives you 30 minutes access to a realm of sentient toilets, cricket burgers, ornamental park guillotines, and cannabis vending machines. Speaking as a bitter old millennial, I found my 30 minutes delightful.
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The key thing, perhaps, is that while this is fundamentally a pisstake of fading misers with right-wing conservative views, it reserves some of its vinegar for the lefties who now run the show. It’s not just a playable lecture, or not so far, at least. I’m not sure the devs would appreciate the comparison, but it reminds me a little of Pluribus, the Apple TV series about a hateful author living out a fortified existence after microbes transform the majority of humanity into a benevolent gestalt intelligence. It also has great voice-acting together with smooth and sleepy 3D visuals, and will run on relatively modest hardware, like the i5 with integrated graphics I’m writing this on. Give the demo a go, why not?
The bitter old boomer above is Harvey Huffstone. He’s sick of the wholesome reality he now inhabits, and has applied for euthanasia under the new universal healthcare system. Yes, I guess you could frame this as a story about suicide, but that’s not how “self-scheduled” death is understood within this society. The writing and tone in general are lightly caricatured, but not outright goofy. Huffstone himself isn’t a study in acute depression and misery; he’s sort of Danny Devito with a touch of Clint Eastwood. When he sprints, he trails his arms to either side like an arthritic Naruto.
Anyway, to prove that his desire for euthanasia isn’t “in your generation’s terms, an impulse purchase”, Harvey has to complete a bucket list of open world chores generated by an AI from his personal data. It’s not a very impressive list, which is partly a joke about generative AI sloppification. Highlights include having a cigar, having a Coke, and eating a “real steak”. But it’s exotic in that it’s anachronistic. Beef steaks, for example, are hard to find because, as you’re told by one food van driver, intensive animal agriculture has been abolished: it’s a waste of land and a source of carbon emissions and zoonotic diseases.
Elsewhere, the writing pokes fun at certain open world conventions, which are themselves now relics of a bygone, more “consumptive” era. You can have Harvey ceremonially gather sticks in the hopes of a hidden reward, for example. Of relevance: the game’s Steam page character art is a riff on Grand Theft Auto box covers, with normative, chiselled depictions of in-game characters.
Stick-collecting aside, you’ll play Future? No Thanks! for the chats between Harvey and various unimpressed but supportive cooks, students, receptionists, and workshop engineers. The writing is academically inflected without, I think, being up its own ivory tower. At one point Harvey refers to it all as “utopia” (perjorative), only for a librarian to comment that it’s more of a “heterotopia in the Foucaultian sense”, to which Harvey says that there’s nothing “hetero” about any of it. In the same library, you find a volume of Marx’s Capital that has been translated into Cyberpunk 2077 language – I haven’t checked to see if it’s the full text – perched next to a volume about “Worldbuilding on the Cheap”.
“An artisanal game made with locally sourced talent and zero capitalists, marketers, or profiteers,” is how the game’s Steam page describes it. “In a medium dominated by dystopias, Future? No Thanks! imagines a political project for the present.” I’m a little leery of that self-intro: is that “zero capitalists, marketers, or profiteers” with the exception of the people running Steam? Still, I embrace the spirit, and they’re obviously clowning around somewhat with their talk of “locally sourced talent”. The full thing will apparently last you around six hours, spanning seven “non-linear” quests, and is out tomorrow 22nd July.
