I said it somewhere else but I do have some passing Internet familiarity with Tim Soret before he was Tim Soret, designer of The Last Night. A bit with his online persona and certainly with the context and community (a videogame splinter forum much like the Bore, really, occasional edginess included) I read him in. I wouldn't claim to know the guy well by any means but I certainly believe him when he said he voted for far left Mélenchon last election. Which doesn't automatically mean he has good opinions on everything but GAFERA depiction seems comically overblown (it's not like they themselves are immune to some conservative tendencies sometimes). He was often ribbed, IIRC, for being the quintessential Parisian gentrified left leaning urban elite.
I think benjipwns kinda nailed that one last time when he suspected there was some severe cultural misunderstanding at work here.
Also Soret has been committed to making aesthetic, story driven platformer for a bit now (I believe he was a big fan of Brothers : A tale of Two Sons or a similar title around that time) and he had to endure quite a bit of light-hearted banter. It's cool he managed to make it in the end.
Edit : And yeah obviously, Another World and Flashback are pretty significant over here as you would expect.
I am unsurprised that the induhlectuals at ResetERA.com (now with era CLEAR, just $39.99 a year) continue to try and force his worldview to fit into their one-size-fits-all worldview. The paranoid one where nearly everything bad is not just bad but often working together for hidden nefarious ends that sucker in the dupes, I'm surprised he isn't yet suspected of having Russian ties.
It was the aforelinked waypoint interview where I realized the cultural disconnect, as the waypoint interviewer doesn't even understand what he's describing and instead continues to frame it or force into a frame within a contemporary and temporary subset of American politics. Or debate him about a hypothetical setting for a video game. I have to assume they didn't even pick up on how
stereotypically French his answers are just from the way they're constructed logically.
The funny thing is that they're making the game's premise seem more controversial or counterculture or transgressive than it is, when it arguably should be the least interesting thing about the game considering how often the premise is used across media in general. From what I can tell the main reflection of the premise of a utopia that has failed is in the motif, something that even a publisher like EA has presented in Mirror's Edge and Syndicate, albeit without (so far) liking tweets deemed hate speech by independent groupthinkers who are progressively defining the standards for modern video gaming.
