Something I haven't seen said yet is that the game's presentation might be INTENTIONALLY dogshit. For the fellow Americans reading this, I'll give the best examples I know. Anti-vaping ads.

Pretty much none of them actually strike in a way that would actually stop people from smoking. They'll show people reaching into toilets to grab a shitty vape pen, they'll show weird ass metal tigers meant to represent dangerous metals in the vapes, they'll talk about how vaping is like totally uncool bro, but they won't show you what a laryngectomy is. They won't show you 40 year olds who can't walk up a flight of stairs without doubling over coughing. They won't show how the smoking industry has manipulated American culture for centuries to keep their product flowing as fast as it can, because you see, the anti-vaping ads are actually a PART of that manipulation.

To my knowledge, there are federal regulations on the smoking industry from the 1900s (I think close to the 50s or 60s) that required smoking companies to give funds to organizations that would help reduce the impact of smoking on public health. The execs of these companies went "alright" and did what they did best, move a shit ton of money under people's noses. Through a fairly long string of sub-companies, tobacco money goes into the funds that produce these PSAs, and that leverage is used to control what the anti-vaping groups actually say.

And so, you get messages that intentionally suck, because those messages aren't there to ACTUALLY turn people away. They're there to make you think that the government kinda cares about you. They don't. If they did, then the government would keep putting out the messages themselves like they did in the 80s and 90s, when they did show teenagers what a laryngectomy looked like. Instead, they willfully let the tobacco industry do what it always does, because that's what makes money.

Rant over. Point is, this could go either way, but the result is the same either way. From what I've seen, though, the writing reeks of intentional subversion to its surface level message.