Helldivers 2’s propaganda goes beyond just the cutscenes and general vibe. The major order text and even developers’ social media all ties into the overall narrative.
Helldivers 2 does a fantastic job of straddling the line between being a great game to goof around in with your friends, and delivering actual commentary and world-building about the folly of an oppressive regime. You play as a titular Helldiver, shot down to enemy planets in pods that look like giant bullets — no obvious symbolism there — to fight back waves of nasty Terminid bugs and evil robots. The gameplay is great, but what I’ve come to truly love is the goofy Super Earth propaganda, and how it perfectly encapsulates fascism as a ridiculous ideology that is doomed to fail.
There is a running meta-narrative alongside Helldivers 2, in which Super Earth command (aka the developers) tells the players what fronts to fight on and what enemies to prioritize. When the community pulls together to achieve these objectives, everybody gets Warbond medals, which they can spend on valuable loot and cosmetics. If they fail, nobody gets a medal, and something usually goes terribly wrong. The secret trick, though, is that even when things go right, they’ll still go bad, because Super Earth is terrible at the whole galactic liberation thing.
If you stop and listen to all of that propaganda, something becomes clear: We’re the baddies. The Terminids were released from Super Earth facilities, and we’re killing them because they’re a great source of space oil.
