I first played Quake IV around 15 years ago, and was very much impressed by the Giger-esque body horror of the setting. Beheaded torsos embedded within some cyberpunk machinery as biovessels or batteries, twitching and screaming despite having no throat; living soldiers vivisected and turned into remotely controlled robotic weaponry, wrecking havoc upon their former friends on the battlefield; piles of flesh and rotting carcasses of those deemed unworthy to be consuned as food... All of this is portrayed within a dystopian cyberpunk setting of towers a thousand floors high, labyrinths of tunnels and railroad, and giant industrial facilities covering a decaying, lifeless planet. Strogg technology, advanced beyond comprehension, feeds upon human flesh and life force, seeking to destroy life itself and transform everything into a disgusting, zombified mockery of a living being. This, dare I say it, atmosphere, is perfectly conveyed through visuals and a number of designed set-pieces and scripted events. Because this dystopia is quickly becoming a reality, thanks to technofeudalist AI slot machines reducing human personality traits into generative outputs with market value, here's a humble list of why Quake IV is a valid social commentary:

1. Personal preference, but Quake IV should be played on the highest difficulty setting. This is the only way the player might truly feel the hopelessness of fighting the technologically advanced enemy civilization and grasp the dread of everyone around dying non-stop without the dissonance of solo gameplay being a cakewalk on easier difficulties. The game achieves the difficulty by both making Kane die from several chip shots or one heavy hit, and by making all the enemies essentially damage sponges. The player can always find that particular heavy hit that will instantly drop health/shield bars from 250 to 50-80, because practically every late-game enemy has some sort of a charge attack you have to dodge, or a rocket attack with auto-aim you need to shoot down, or an enormous health bar, or the ability to spawn other enemies, or all of those things combined. Enemies supposedly have some technological modifications, making them resistant to certain weapons (though this isn't directly communicated to the player), as the only way an enemy mob made at least partially of human flesh can survive more than a dozen of rocket launcher direct hits is due to the fact that flesh, on its own, is weak in the setting. Combine all of that with most of the game being set in dark and narrow corridors and you've got a narratively fitting gaming experience.

2. The narrative routinely presents the idea of humans in the universe being actively reduced to a function, largely through a disregard to properly introduce characters and only superficially maintaining their personalities. This is further enforced by most of the characters using the same or very similar models. Quake IV educates the player on human life being essentially worthless through a series of plot-specific events tied to characters dying on the battlefield or being transformed or murdered before Kane's eyes. The player, however, is given no chance of saving these characters (as their deaths are scripted), and Kane never actively expresses guilt or grief. The most characteristic of these scenes is the one where a random engineer sends a frightened recruit into a dark room which was just unsealed... only for that recruit to be brutally murdered. The engineer intentionally stops the player from interfering and helping the recruit, and never comments on their inactions. Other scripted deaths are presented as plot exposition within a cutscene; in these cutcenes, Kane simply ignores his ally being killed and dragged away for dozens of seconds. The revelation of Voss being transformed into a disfigured body powering up a biomechanical robot while maintaing consciousness and asking Kane to free them from their suffering is a brilliant narrative move... because, as Voss was given no more exposition than any other disposable character, the sequence then essentially symbolizes that this is the fate of every human, if the Strogg are never stopped.

3. Further extending these ideas, some characters are introduced and given plot-specific lines of dialogue, but in fact, they are ment to be discarded at the first opportunity, as the game either won't care if you keep them alive or will outright stop them from progressing with you. Just a set of examples: A. In one of the evacuations sequences, Kane is addressed as the solo survivor despite my character arriving at the site with three other soldiers, B. Next mission, the player is forced to leave an accompanying surviving soldier behind because the path leads through a crack in the wall, which that soldier silently decides not to enter (and he is presumably left in the burning industrial facility forever), C. Same mission, Kane is given two accompanying soldiers to enter an underground complex, and both of them won't return with him, deciding to stay in the dark guarding an empty elevator without any explicit command, D. Subsequently, when Kane takes the elevator alone, the game introduces another disposable ally, who is given some lines of dialogue and will run to his suicide once the doors are open fighting two enemies capable of one-shotting him (if saved, he just stands there as he failed to fulfill his raison d'etre). The narrative introduces dead marines in locations Kane is supposedly venturing into for the first time in the relevant operation, the noise of marines screaming off-screen is constant, and Kane is predestined to always be late to save any of them. Sometimes, the deaths are explicitly attributed to poor technology, specifically, to hung-up computers.

4. When Kane is stroggified, the game promptly gives you the only reflective surface in the campaign to check out the looks, which is expected, given the trailers, the presentation, and the narrative make this transformation kind of a big deal. The two ways the transformation is referenced in the narrative further down the plot are: A. Kane not only looks mutilated and different... is he still human? Several times an allied soldier "almost shoots" Kane when they meet. Unsirprising really, because how exactly can anyone tell that this particular strogg is in fact friendly? B. While the medical hub cutscene made clear Kane is only alive because of being intoxicated on some strong chemicals, the command rushes to send the soldier who has undergone a traumatizing disfigurement made with crude and rusty tools (and not only he was disemboweled and dismembered in the process, but there was... stuff planted in his brain as well) to the frontlines, because maybe he can fool some enemy defences. Both types of reactions to the unfortunate circumstances Kane has gone through never touch the subject of his feelings, his self, his humanity, because essentially, it doesn't matter as Kane's only worth for his fighting skills. Even Kane is disposable.

In conclusion, the game tells the story of the human race fighting a remote technological dystopia that turns living beings into food and bioweapons. The social commentary goes further than that, as human army commanders are blissfully unaware they are doing to humanity practically the same thing, but without any clear use case. There's an anecdote by Bronislaw Malinovski: when he told a cannibal about the Great War, the cannibal was shocked by the European cruelty, killing so many men and never eating the corpses. The Strogg, being a metaphor for technological progress, may present humanity a similar dilemma.

Technical details: Proton Experimental, 11 hours to completion, no Steam achievements, no bugs encountered (graphics require a community config fix).
Edit: typos, formatting.

This game... says a lot about society. While I see some sort of critique aimed at the developer, the elephant in the room with an obnoxiously cliché story is still glossed over. I mean — what would I expect from a furry porn game? — but this one has almost 9k reviews at the moment, and as we all know, popular media (books, movies, blogs, etc.) frame life expectations and moral orientation — and porn, specifically in a culture obsessed with weird tokenization of self through virtual sexual/gender/romantic combos and material consumption of the body and soul, frames expectations of the other as well. So, what do we have here..?

1. More often than not, the character judges their feelings for the player by how their close friend views the player. It’s comically petty in the setting, but given how often you can’t get away from random so-called friends’ opinions, even in the context of mere friendships, it’s pretty realistic. Nudes get circulated, message history gets shared, people judge each other in their back... No coincidence that after a single date in the game, some rando shows up asking you interview questions and making your date advice on how prospective of a candidate you are. A variant includes a scene where the player’s presumed ♥♥♥♥♥♥ classmates serve as a plot device, which actually implies the player-controlled avatar had an actual life before becoming this unemployed brother-lusting YCH... Anyways,
2. Several times, the whole character arc revolves around them getting over their ex (each time the ex is portrayed as manipulative and abusive ♥♥♥♥♥ as they always are). Yet again, real life people will compare you to their exes, and more often than not these exes (be it past friends or past partners) really mean more to the person than yourself (and obsessively hating a person is even worse of a personality trait than entrusting your opinion of the other to whoever is in your friend list at the moment).
3. Most of the time, all the character needs for their arc to progress is for the player to... listen to their story? Yet again, real life people are so touch-starved and emotionally detached from each other due to the abundance of social network interactions plaguing society with simulacrum of affection that it seems... pretty reasonable.
4. More often than not, the character exhibits hobbies that are portrayed so shallow that it makes said character not even a stereotype but a caricature. Yet again, social media-infested hellscape of human interactions lets you qualify as a hobby enthusiast as soon as you put the associated hashtag/label in your bio and optionally make a channel, group, public page, or whatever, so... yeah.
5. Speaking of stereotypes, here we have: a trans girl openly fetishized via her obsession with sex, gay people flaneuring from a threesome to an orgy, a weird incest fantasy with a slutty brother shoved into you by how the game advances, etc. — which I guess is fine for a furry porn game if these stereotypes weren’t harmful for the communities portrayed (queer people in general and furries).
6. Fetishes and love concepts explored in the game are pretty mild by furry porn standards, but once again, lie completely in line with stereotypes about dating and sex in general. Both falling in love furever after a date or two, and sex scenes that are described so disconnected from how sexual intercourse goes in reality are an imprint of a stereotype about human relationships that idealizes or downplays love affairs to the point of it either being only sex (thus, the lover can be switched every day to spice it up) or being desirable only with a perfectly suitable partner (who is tossed in the bin once mutual disagreements eventually arise). It’s no wonder 4/5 marriages end up with divorce or a side affair (source: the voices).
7. In line with #6, it's pretty ironic that once you finish dating with one of the characters and skip the credits section, you're deposited back into the club so that you may find another victim for your partners collection. Implied promiscuity here is so subtle it feels natural for the setting, and the normalization of treating another human anthro being as an interchangeable object with market value is one of the sad consequences of industrial society all western cultures had to go through.

Also, I’m not judging art or writing quality per se (as I’m not an artist or a writer), but the game doesn’t seem to settle on whether it shows something or expects you to imagine it through reading text over a static (sometimes even black) image. I’m just saying that reused assets, 2-3 expressions per character (and sometimes even static character models), and heavily blurred backgrounds mix very poorly with walls of my-first-furry-rp text you have to consume whilst observing them, considering the text is sometimes inconsistent with what is shown explicitly. Oh well, I judged it anyways.

Overall the game deserves a thumbs-up just for the fact it makes the issues with the fragmented, infocratic, technofeudalist, consumerist, and morally blind culture we all live in all more obvious. I liked Seth and Lex the most.

Technical details: Proton Experimental, no bugs/glitches, all achievements can be completed.
Edit: fixed typos, added #7, made Lex a knot.