Opinion: Blue Estate's humiliated mermaid won't leave me alone

When the embargo for Blue Estate lifted last week, I had two options: write about the game and include that I felt excluded while playing it, or don't write about it at all. The second choice is hardly an option when it's my job to provide feedback on games the world hasn't seen yet, and I take my job seriously. Unfortunately, my personal response to Blue Estate is so overwhelming, even one month later, that I can't write about it without including these reactions, even though I find it embarrassing and extremely stressful to share my emotions - gah, gag me with a spoon - in a public forum.

So, here we go.

Blue Estate is a boiling bevy of extremes - it's based on the Blue Estate comic series published by Image, which tells the sordid tales of drug lords, mafia men, scantily clad women, has-beens and sarcastic jerks of every flavor dumped into the back alleys of LA. Blue Estate the game focuses on one of these caricatures, Tony Luciano, who is - you guessed it - a mobster and son of the Godfather of West Coast Cosa Nostra.

I played a demo of Blue Estate at Gamescom. In the demo, it's clear Tony is a sarcastic, fumbling racist with a gun and a lot of luck. He's greedy, inconsiderate and narcissistic, and I can practically feel the grease building up in my hair as I point his gun at enemy after enemy. Tony is every bit the stereotypical, jaded mobster, with that cliché's most obvious traits pushed to the extreme.

Another character featured prominently in the demo, but not playable, is Cherry Popz. She's a stripper, and in the same way Tony's macho stupidity is enhanced, Cherry has enhancements - when she's introduced, the narration focuses on her jaw-dropping beauty while the images focus on her body. She has a problem and she's seeking professional help from an overweight, unshowered, male private eye (who is privately eyeing her through a pair of thick glasses). During playable moments, Cherry wears a tiny black two-piece and heels, and at one point she gives me a full-on pole dance.

Now - I've been to strip clubs and I don't find notion of a woman in lingerie offensive or disgusting, but Blue Estate has the natural ability to turn sexiness into exploitation, humor into humiliation and my own enjoyment into exasperation, with a neon sign flashing the philosophy that I don't need to feel comfortable here.

I've never felt unwelcome in a strip club.

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Opinion: Blue Estate's humiliated mermaid won't leave me alone originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 20 Sep 2013 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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