"Male Gaze" the game: Snowbreak
Decided to post this game after reading another post on here. Like yeah, I get it, but saying the "male gaze" doesn't exist is stupid when stuff like this exist.
This month, I decided to spend a couple hours downloading and playing this game. Beforehand, I somewhat heard of the abysmal descent of Snowbreak as it began pandering to one of the worse niches: incels. While it supposedly saved the game from shutting down, it changed so many aspects that it's a "censored" (I'll go back to this) goon game that happened to be FPS. Its playerbase embodies the gacha gamer stereotype so well, it makes other hardcore fans in other gacha games look tame. After completing the "prologue", I uninstalled and removed it from my steam account. That was how bad it was for me, because I tend to hold free games in my library (including those type of games).
The prologue was terrible. Aside from introducing you to the protagonist and his small harem squad of three girls, it didn't explain jackshit, not even the world's setting, despite one of the girls being in cryosleep for decades because of an incurable disease. Thing is, the previous one got retconned, and if I'm remembering correct, including the original story line. So now, you're already thrown into the middle of the story after just starting it. Furthermore, in order to appease its fans, male characters no longer exist (some got genderbent to be part of protag-kun's harem instead), an upcoming female character was removed just because she wasn't in-love with the protagonist (like every other female character apparently... yikes?). Oh, and female characters don't interact with each other to avoid NTR.
I might've gone on and on, but I spent too much time articulating words to put, so I'll just wrap things up and elaborate on the game's censorship. Some time ago, this game had to comply with China's censorship laws, which it did comply with, but only on the surface. While it would present censored content to regulators, Snowbreak's developers quietly handed over a file that allowed players to play the game uncensored. However, for some reason, the game tried to collab with a government post office, which caused them to finally catch on. Subsequently, the game to go down for 66 days, and when it became playable again, pretty much everything was censored and/or removed from the game. The playerbase was not happy, to say the least. So yeah, rant over. Thank you for reading.
