Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn is a new Soulslike/Souls-lite game that’s currently getting review-bombed on Xbox by racists. Sorry, are we not supposed to call people that? Unfortunate, because that’s what they are.
Flintlock is a game about the main character, Nor Vanek, fighting through hordes of undead with her ax and other melee weapons, a multitude of flintlock guns, and some magic courtesy of a talking, flying fox god named Enki. Sounds pretty cool, right? It is. Flintlock is pretty good. It’s not perfect by any means; there are performance issues to wade through and, at times, the gameplay loop gets a bit too repetitive for my taste, but the world is legitimately interesting and the combat really does have its moments. Its Steam reviews are currently sitting at Mostly Positive and it has a 71 on Metacritic, which generally means a game might not be great, but it’s good. Ah, and one more thing: The main character is a Black woman.
Cue the most predictable, cowardly keyboard warriors in existence.
As reported by GameRant, the Xbox reviews for Flintlock are much lower than other platforms, with many users giving the game the lowest possible rating before complaining about DEI, which stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and accusing the game of being made with Sweet Baby Inc., a diversity consultancy company that absolutely ruined games like… uh… the award-winning Alan Wake 2. And, as far as we can tell, that’s all because Nor Vanek is a Black woman.
Let’s be clear: Instantly labeling a game as bad because the main character is a Black woman is racist. That’s a thing racists do. I’m sure many of the people who like to type “Sweet Baby detected” in Twitter threads don’t think they are racist. They are wrong.
A game where you hack, slash, and shoot zombies in the face with the help of your magical flying fox god friend does not require a white male protagonist. This is a fantasy realm and a video game, not a history book. Nor does a game owe it to any of its players to design female characters within the incredibly narrow confines of being hot to one subsect of people.
But those are statements that won’t get through to the vast majority of people who complain about DEI. So let’s just make it clear: If you immediately say a game is bad because the main character is Black, that’s racist. And if you do this a bunch, you’re consistently doing a racist thing.
I can only think of one word that then accurately describes you.
