Glacier Kitsune

Here are some of the themes and events I have run into in this game so far

This is far from a complete list, and I have only seen some of what's included here - I've spent less than an ingame month with this world and I've only visited a fraction of the inhabited systems.

For example, there is a culture of isolationist systems run by a "strong man" authoritarian dictator that only justifies contact with other systems by stating that they're after their "obviously superior" cultural products. I haven't visited these systems yet, but I can only imagine they're an allusion to North Korea in the same way that the hypercapitalist Leon sectors are modelled after America.

housing & homelessness

you learn about a housing shortage on a certain station in the hyper-capitalist central system. It's revealed through news articles that the cause is investors buying up property as an investment vehicle, leaving people homeless and priced out of housing while those same houses sit empty.

The station, tired of dealing with a visible homelessness crisis, installes electroshock modules designed to deliver shocks to people in common areas after midnight. In one instance, they malfunction and electrocute people to the point of serious injury during the day. A group of hacktivists starts reprogramming them to believe their clocks have the wrong time so they never activate.

A few days later, someone buys access to an airlock and permanently welds his ship to it, then starts allowing any other ship with two or more airlocks to dock to his, under the condition that they use their remaining airlocks to allow other ships to dock as well, forming an ad-hoc network of free shelter attached to the station. You, as the player, start receiving missions to ferry people as passengers to this new housing.

News articles increasingly refer to it as "illegal housing" - I haven't seen how the scenario plays out yet, but I don't imagine the capitalist system governance will tolerate it for long.

sex workers

another plot beat that shows up in the news is that one of the big banks representing the hyper-capitalist systems has decided to decline accounts & transaction services to sex workers, in a move mirroring recent actions taken by real world financial services

once again, news articles following the main announcement detail how this forces sex workers into using outlawed physical currency, and an increase in violence and how the new working conditions have resulted in increased abuse against them

at one point, a character at one of the affected station presents you with a petition to sign on their behalf (and also for the aforementioned homeless population) and will strongly advocate for their position if you waffle at all

race, poverty, prison

before anything else, I just want to note that the primary NPC who starts the quest in this section is explicitly identified by your translator UI as speaking Māori, implying that Māori culture and te reo Māori speakers are present in this game's future. I don't think the character is necessarily meant to explicltly be a representation of Maori culture, given how far removed from present day and Earth the game is, but I also don't think I have ever seen another game represent an actual Māori person, so it's worth stating (and no, appropriation of Tā Moko (tattooing) seen in some recent games doesn't count)

Before anything specific, the game makes it clear and consistent through mechanics, that the pervasive capitalism in the game's sector systemtatically disadvantages people from poor systems, who are unambiguously racialized.

Docking fees in poor systems are much lower (5c vs 100c in rich central systems), trade goods from these systems tend to be manual labour items, like clothing.

These systems have a pervasive for-profit prison industry run by foreign capitalists from the central systems.

And this one didn't hit me immediately - I'd been doing trade runs for some medical goods to the central systems when I first got out there, and finally found a source of affordable organ transplants in these systems - normally an item very, very hard to find below market rates. And they were especially affordable at the for-profit prison station. Wait, oh no. Dear Reader, I firmly believe they are saying exactly what you think they're saying about the exploitation of the bodies of poor & vulnerable populations.

A mission within one of these sectors asks you to assist in some ~somewhat shady~ deals to facilitate a prison hunger strike centred around a well known personality who'd been imprisoned for a protest against the system's puppet government with the aim of eroding their power base & support during an upcoming election and placing a local in charge.

When you do this, a few days later, you receive a news article about seven mysterious, inexplicable deaths on the prison colony, and that the well known protestor would no longer be in contact with the public, by choice, for personal reasons (firmly implying that foreign capitalist institutions put down this challenge to their power with lethal force to protect their own interests)

labour

I have admittedly only begun to scratch the surface of these missions, but so far there are news articles implying that the hyper-capitalist sectors have been interfering in work stoppages, strikes, and negotiations within the Tegan Union.

There's a mission line which involves the destruction of an entire mining colony and loss of all workers as well. You're on the side of a journalist trying to get to the bottom of what really happened underneath a unified media campaign of "what a tragic accident" and ... a military blockade around the colony preventing anyone from getting close enough to investigate. I haven't got further than that, but it's implied that there's a plot thread involving unsafe working conditions here.

the war on drugs

Again, this is a plot line I haven't got very far into, if there even is more to follow up on. The introduction to it starts with the central capitalist system banning a common drug because, despite therapeutic uses, it also being "abused" recreationally by some people.

It's implied that the drug has valid medical uses, and that in most cases (except the most uncommonly heavy users), it is basically harmless. The direct description that one of the off-label uses of the drug being to enhance memory for studying, they are drawing a direct line to politically motivated restrictions on real-world medications like ADHD drugs.

I haven't got far enough into this yet to comment further, though.

In this mission, you're contacted by a representative from a company that was conducting a survey of an inhabited rim system out into some nearby uninhabited systems, looking for new gas deposit mining prospects.

The ship went missing, and you're tasked with following the navigational beacons it was dropping during its survey to discover its fate, and ultimately, if possible, recover the ship and its crew. Each nav beacon you find each contains a copy of the ships logs which hint at where to head next, and also contain a small short story worth of flavour text.

I like this mission's design because it largely tests your ability to run silent to evade pirates, your ability to navigate through hazardous space safely, your ability to use your sensors and navigation to plot courses based on known planets, known coordinates, and relative bearings, and asks you to actually read the logs to work out where to go next.

The beacons start out simple, routine stops near the outer regions of a relatively safe, inhabited rim system. The directions they give you are explicit - "we headed out on bearing 179 from our current position" and the story text sets up the premise and characters involved. After these first couple beacons, they have you jump out to the first uninhabited system.

The first uninhabited system starts introducing some mild threats, but is largely pretty tame. The first beacon you encounter has a pirate ship patrolling nearby, but you enter the system close enough to the sun that you can run dark on solar power and it's not too hard to evade them. The system itself isn't hard to navigate. A few dark nebulas provide cover to run more noisy systems like reactors and your jump drive safely, and navigational hazards like asteroids are relatively uncommon and out of the way. They mostly use this time to set up some internal conflict within the crew. After asking the player to work out the next destination a couple times using just a quardrant and number of moons at each planet, you move on.

The second uninhabited system is where the meat of the mission happens. You jump in at the outer rim, almost too far to use solar power for more than a small percent of its capacity. You only have a partial coordinate for this destination, because part of the message was lost, but you can work out which planet it is by elimination. You start in a region full of sparse astroid fields that you can either avoid by navigating around them - but this takes you too far out to use solar power at all, so you'll have to rely on your reactor or batteries, or you can navigate through the narrow safe gaps it's implied that the St. Stella Maris took.

When you get to the first beacon, this is when things turn south. The conflict they set up in the previous sector takes a bad turn and a crew member is badly injured. At the same time, the ship takes a crippling hit from a rogue asteroid or other stellar body, loses half the crew, most of the aft section is unusable, and the ship is drifting without navigation or sensors. From this point on, the ship is drifting, flying blind, and cannot report on its position in further beacon updates. From here on out, the player is tasked less with following a set of directions, as much as they are supposed to interpret what the story sections of the logs represent - "found ourselves in an asteroid field, made a blind course correction to avoid," "no longer able to take bearings, drifting in space" and so on.

At this point, the path of the beacons is predictable, and the challenge becomes navigating the razor thin safe passages through the hazardous nebulae to each one that follows.

And finally, you emerge into relatively safe space, with dark nebula cover for safety, and they give you the final few beacons to close out the story before giving finally you the derelict wreck of the St. Stella Maris with one single living soul left onboard.

The last few log entries go some pretty dark places. Betrayal by the crew member who wounded the other crewmate earlier. To be frank, some desperate cannibalism as the captain finally gives into delerium and desperation. This part isn't exactly comfortable so I will not elaborate further.

And finally, you're tasked with taking him back to inhabited space and deciding his fate.