While a bunch of websites and YouTubers are handing out awards for the same series of creatively broke games that were either, at best, sub-par trash with recycled ideas from a decade ago, or at worst, digital cancer being fed through the corporate feeding tube of marketing-approved aids. But I can’t be bothered to give out participation awards because someone hit “compile” on a bunch of code that isn’t a complete and otherwise controller-crippling experience for some sort of barely playable visualization of feces in the form poorly masked propaganda. Screw that chimpanzee logic.

Instead, it’s best to celebrate the debilitating growth of one of the most degenerate themes in pop-culture today: being woke.

Anyone who uses that unironically as a way to describe themselves not only failed basic English but probably never worked an honest day in their life, and even if they claimed they did they’re probably a bigger liar than the dictator profusely swearing on the grave of his twenty kids that his brand of socialism will work this time, really.

Anyway, this isn’t an awards list for best game, or most awesome graphics, or anything trite like that. No, this is denigrating – oops, I mean celebrating games that decided to sacrifice themselves at the altar of cultural altruism.

God of War

A bunch of Sony fanboys will tell you that this deserved Game of the Year award because it’s a story about a father and a son, and it has great graphics, and creative director Cory Barlog managed to keep the team focused and on track with designing a game that has no camera cuts. While impressive from a technological perspective, the game itself is pretty ho-hum when looking at the actual gameplay mechanics. The fighting is pretty mundane and horribly repetitive. Things slightly pick up when Kratos gets a second pair of weapons, but a 10 or so hour journey using a lot of the same combos on a lot of repeated enemies gets repetitive real quick.

But that’s not the biggest sin of all… the biggest sin is just how toned down the game is compared to when David Jaffe was the creative director over God of War. The violence tries to be philosophical instead of there to be entertaining and fun, and there is zero nudity or sex scenes. All the hot-body hotties from the previous games are nowhere to be seen. The only recurring humanoid chick in the game is basically middle-aged (according to god-tier standards) and doesn’t shed any of her clothing. It’s like taking American Ninja and turning it into a philosophical road trip story about the diminishing necessities of ninja assassins in a modern world that now relies on hitmen you can hire from Craigslist. It’s award bait for sure, but a lot of what made the series fun is completely lost in its attempt to take itself so seriously, especially as the hero tries to protect his wife’s son throughout the journey.

Detroit: Become Human

I was almost torn about adding this one to the list. Is it really that “woke”? Well, there are two parts to this. On one hand, the game gives you a lot of options in how you can unfold the story and which characters you favor during the lead up to the big robot revolution. This is nice for those who just want to maintain a proper human-led society and follow that story thread to its natural conclusion. If you play through the game focusing mostly on Connor’s story then it’s a-okay.

However, the more damning part is the game’s not-so-subtle masquerade as Black Lives Matter propaganda. Anyone who plays through Markus’ story knows exactly what I’m talking about. Markus has to “rise up” as the leader of the robots who attempt to fight for equal rights. If you just winced and cringed reading that line, well, you’re not alone because a lot of other people did, too. Detroit: Become Human had an opportunity to become something worthwhile, but too much of the game decided to poorly structure its story around the very obvious subtext of discrimination and oppression, which just made its wokeness unbearable to the nth degree.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

How do you take one of the most iconic female video game characters of all time and reduce her to a sniveling, annoying, psycho-witch with an aversion for killing and penchant for murder? I have no idea how anyone sane of mind could write one of the most bipolar, nonsensical anti-heroes ever featured in a video game. Well, that’s exactly what happened with the Tomb Raider reboot trilogy.

This game is like the pinnacle of oxymoron. You have some chick who adventures around the world looking for lost artifacts but hates tombs… what? She’s constantly climbing and fighting bad guys and hired mercenary killers from all over the world, yet doesn’t learn any martial arts… what? Worse yet, she proclaims that she hates killing and is constantly fighting to save her friends’ lives by… murdering hundreds of men? The finale in the reboot trilogy was still filled with all the head-scratching psychometric nonsense that plagued the previous two games. Only this time they had at least had the wherewithal to have Lara’s husky, beta male sidekick finally tell her that “It’s not all about you, Lara!” after she began complaining and whining for the umpteenth time. In a way, I should be congratulating Crystal Dynamics and Eidos for ending the reboot trilogy here, because I don’t think I could deal with anymore of this insufferably whiny rendition of Lara Croft.

Celeste

The game itself isn’t that woke, since it’s just a faux 8-bit platformer. But by Jove is the press surrounding this game woke. The media promoted Celeste to the high heavens because it deals with mental illness, and because of that the developers tackling a subject deemed “woke” by the media instantly put it high up on the awareness list of media outlets.

Celeste is more like a game that makes the list by proxy, due to game journalists being insufferable propagandists who just couldn’t leave well enough alone. Sure games like Iconoclasts nearly fall into the same category, but it wasn’t making top 10 lists and being up for GOTY awards just because it stroked the two-inch schlong that is the game journalists’ ego. That’s not to mention that having a few tokens on the development team and licking the proverbial clitoral ring of the social justice caliphate by paying constant lip service to Anita Sarkeesian pretty much guaranteed that the developers would be receiving coverage from all of the usual suspects.

Battletech

From a gameplay perspective, you can’t really chew up and spit out Harebrained Schemes’ Battletech because it’s absolutely more than solid, almost borderline perfect to be honest. It’s a legitimate throwback to the hexagonal turn-based strategy games that put the series on the map back in the old FASA days. However, this isn’t a list about games with great gameplay immersing players into a fully realized world, this is about games that, in spite of their gameplay, decided they needed to get woke in order to brainwash its audience in some infantile way to push Leftist politics. Sadly, Battletech was one of those games.

This game had an opportunity to be something grand, but Harebrained Schemes decided to undercut its own efforts by adopting the whole anti-white narrative that has been pushed so heavily by widely derided media outlets and game journalists. This included completely scraping any possibility of making blonde-haired, blue-eyed characters in the character creation utility, and it also included forcing a “diverse” cast of characters into the story to hammer home how “woke” Harebrained Schemes actually is, even when it undermined the lore of the universe itself.

Life Is Strange 2

How could you have a list about games being “woke” without including Dontnod Entertainment’s farcical adventure drama, Life Is Strange 2? This game is more woke than a crack addict getting SWATTED after tripping out on LSD while live-streaming the 1982 flick Liquid Sky on Twitch. It also managed to jump the shark right out of the gate, going for a silly tale about two Mexican trying to trek back to Mexico after their father is killed by a trigger-happy white cop. Yeah, it’s one of those games. The gameplay and dialogue are as cringe-worthy and mundane as the original Life Is Strange, but with an added dose of Social Justice politics thrown in for good measure to beat anyone over the head with who didn’t get it during the first 15 minutes or so of the game’s opening.

The first episode is rife with anti-Right propaganda, painting anyone who is Conservative as a racist bigot, even culminating in an older white gentlemen beating up the two Mexican boys because he thinks they’re thieves. It would be laughable if it wasn’t so ridiculous. It borderlines on being satire, with the super-powered Mexican brothers just trying to eat and survive in a “racist” America. I shouldn’t have to explain any further why this game made it on the list for being one of the wokest games of the year, and easily one anyone should avoid if they want to maintain a semblance of sanity.

Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey

I imagine a bunch of Ubisoft fanboys are frothing at the mouth just itching to plug in their mechanical keyboard and hop into the comment section to start defending the masculine virtue’s of Kassandra from Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey. Well, let me tell you this: If you have to defend the masculine qualities of a woman in a video game where she acts more manly than her male counterpart, you’ve already been infected with wokiritis, and the only thing you can do to fix it is to get on a steady diet of testosterone-fueled media. I suggest starting with Commando Ninja, otherwise you’ll develop a nearly irreversible manifestation of a mangina.

Anyway, Ubisoft didn’t even try to hide the fact that Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey was woke propaganda. They admitted that they would be rewriting history for the sake of pushing their agenda, very similar to what they did with Assassin’s Creed: Origins. If you played Odyssey it was pretty obvious that they tried making ancient Greece an egalitarian society in all aspects, which just wasn’t true, especially when it came to the Spartans. Ubisoft decided to throw out history and focus on their feminist fantasy for Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, ensuring that Kassandra was portrayed with all the pomp and masculinity as her male counterpart, Alexios. I don’t care if you liked the game, it’s still woke garbage and that’s why it made this list. Now go cry on ResetEra about it, I’m sure they’ll be accommodating to such sentiments, and likely even offer you a coupon for 15% off a bottle of Soylent.

Battlefield V

There is no game more woke this year than DICE and Electronic Arts’ Battlefield V. It’s the ultimate desecration of World War II, completely rewriting history, throwing in all sorts of fantasy revisionism, and focusing on catering its agitprop to a phantom audience who didn’t even buy the game. While Fallout 76 is creating far more schadenfreude due to Bethesda acting like some sort of parody low I.Q., crime organization attempting to pilfer and plunder the pockets of players, DICE and EA were a lot more deliberate in trying to deliver a quality-made product that nefariously attempted to subvert real life history.

This is the kind of video game perversion that many gamers feared rearing its head in the market; a slickly made game with all the latest graphical bells and whistles to lure in the normies, only to blindside them with Social Justice Warrior propaganda. And oh boy, that’s exactly what DICE did with Battlefield V. The game features a single-player campaign known as War Stories, which recounts tales based on real life events that took place during World War II. Only, DICE decided to redo these stories through the lens of the latter day millennial. This included swapping out the actual bravery and heroism that Norwegians carried out in order to prevent Germany from building a weapon of mass destruction, and replacing it with a mother and daughter duo who killed an entire battalion of German forces by themselves.

It didn’t end there, though. DICE decided that they needed to promote Battlefield V as some sort of poster child for today’s social-media shut-in who believe themselves to be the equivalent of a purple-haired, overweight, non-binary gender warrior. This included a debut trailer featuring a ginger-headed British chick with a missing arm and a hook-springed prosthetic leading a battle across the fields of Norway. Instead of recognizing that this was fantasy-fiction and not historical-fiction, DICE and EA doubled-down by calling their potential customers “Uneducated” and that if they didn’t like their revisionism they shouldn’t buy the game. Well, gamers didn’t buy it, and it cost EA about $350 million in sales, netting the game a nice comfy spot on the Get Woke, Go Broke Master List.

Dishonorable Mentions:

Chuchel: Devs caved to SJWs because they claimed the main character looked like blackface.

Not Tonight: A game about post-Brexit Britain, which has turned into a crap hole. The game got called out for being Leftist propaganda.

Marvel’s Spider-Man: Decided to include a lot of diversity elements and ugly female characters like Mary Jane and Black Cat.

And a special shotout to Sony going full soy in the latter half of 2018 by having a bunch of games censored on the PS4.

[Update:] Special mention to Valve for becoming the “taste police” again and banning games aimed at straight males while using the excuse that it’s due to “child exploitation” and “high school” settings.