I would argue that its actually the opposite. The game is fairly anti-imperialist at points. I haven't played it in a while but I'll try explaining my thoughts. I've been wanting to make a post about Bastion for a while so this is probably going to be pretty long.
Spoilers for Bastion
spoiler
When you first meet Zia she is playing the song "Build That Wall" which describes how the Ura, the native people of the world that bastion takes place in, are going to dig their holes and wait until they can destroy Caelondia, and that any attempts by Caelondia such as building walls are futile. Here's the lyrics if you want to read them. Zia is shown to be an ally throughout the game so I definitely think the developers want you to sympathize with the message. Zulf, the other Ura character is intially shown to be two-faced, inviting himself to the Bastion only to destroy it, but I think he's pretty justified since the Bastion could be another superweapon designed to destroy the Ura just like the last machine the Caelondians built. Even though Zulf is initially portrayed as a villain, I think its pretty clear that he actions are because of his justified hatred of Caelondians considering the whole attempted genocide. If you choose to spare Zulf, the Ura stop fighting you and the song Mother, I’m Here plays which is a really emotional song about Zulf's acceptance of death that helps humanize him. Rucks/the narrator is an fairly evil character despite the fact that he seems so friendly on the surface. He's defintly using The Kid to rebuild the bastion for him and purposefully obfuscates the Bastion's true purpose. He's also distrustful if not outright racist towards the Ura which is why it can somewhat hard to see the positive aspects of the Ura since Rucks is one of your only sources of information about the world. His desire to use the Bastion to travel back in time is a pretty reactionary
view, It could be that he doesn't believe that Caelondians could have caused the world to end and he just wants to go back to the way things used to be. The obvious flaw with this plan is that once this time travel has happened, no one remembers anything that happened and thus can't even try to prevent it from happening which eventually leads to the exact same events happening again. Rucks is most likely aware of this and just doesn't care, he just can't stand living in a reality where his pro-imperialist views have been so thoroughly destroyed. In conclusion, he is quite literally an unreliable narrator. Everything I'm saying about Rucks I'm assuming is at least partially intended by the devs. He's supposed to be a conservative that wants to literally return to an imagined better past. The final choice of either traveling back in time or flying away is an interesting choice because a character you just spent the whole game and trust deeply at this point is trying to convince you to make the wrong decision. The traveling back in time ending is not portrayed as a good ending for all the reasons I described, It's designed to be an awful ending for the game and that's completely normal.
To more directly answer your question, Rucks is definitely a pretty shitty person and leads the player to some pretty awful conclusions about the world through his dialogue that could be considered somewhat fascist in nature. Since he's basically 90% of the game's storytelling, it can seem like the game as a whole is leading you down some awful conclusions. However, when you go against Rucks by sparing Zulf and deciding not to go back in time, the game rewards you with much better outcomes, quite literarily rewarding you with music in the case of sparing Zulf since you don't get to hear his song if you leave him to die. In my view, the devlopers intended for you to have a strong bond with Rucks since you spend so much time with him only to have this relationship deeply questioned near the end of the game by having him advocate for terrible decisions.
To briefly tackle your question from another angle, from interviews/their other games I don't think anyone at Supergiant is right-wing in any way. They don't explicitly put politics into their games and there has never been any sort of controversy involving their politics from what I've seen.
Hopefully that wasn't too wordy and I got my general point across. I'm not trying to dunk on you at all by making this post. I've been wanting to talk about the story of Bastion for a while and this seemed like a good opportunity to do so. This is all just my interpretation of the story and you're free to disagree with me on any of my points.
ZeroRanger. Really solid arcade style 2D shooter that's pretty much perfect in every aspect. The soundtrack in particular is amazing. It even has some small meta storytelling moments which is pretty interesting. It's fairly difficult but not to an insane degree although I have yet to actually beat it because of the final boss rush. Its not unfair it just requires a lot of memorization of patterns like most bosses do, just haven't had the patience to try it again.
VA-11 Hall-A is really good. You play as Jill, a bartender in a cyberpunk city and serve drinks to the various people that come to your bar. There aren't any dialogue choices so the only real way to interact is through making different drinks to alter how conversations and relationships develop. For example giving a different drink than what that person asked for or increasing the alcohol content of a drink to get a customer drunk. The player character is a fully fleshed out character with backstory and development which is interesting, I feel like a majority of VNs just have a player self insert who doesn't speak, not that's a bad thing its just interesting. The game does a good job of having a large variety of characters with interesting stories to tell and different interactions/relationships with Jill and each other. The dialogue is very casual for the most part and has a tendency to be fairly crude which is entertaining while also having plenty of serious moments. The game uses the cyberpunk setting really well, with a lot of commentary on AI, technology and cooperate control over society. Overall an extremely solid visual novel that I've actually replayed multiple times despite the fact that the game doesn't have any branching paths/ different endings, I just enjoy it that much. I'm really looking forward to the sequel N1RV Ann-A which has a similar premise but takes place in a Caribbean resort bar instead of a city bar. I might as well mention Coffee talk here as well since it has the same gameplay loop of serving drinks during a visual novel just in a coffee shop in Portland with fantasy races living along side humans like elves and orcs. It kind of captures the same energy as VA-11 Hall-A but I didn't enjoy it quite as much but still had fun playing it. It's fairly cheap and has a demo so it's worth taking a look at if you really like VNs.
As a side note you could add "Walking Simulator" as a genre if you wanted to. I think games like Stanley Parable and Gone Home are unique enough that they could have their own thread although they could also just be considered adventure games. The term "Walking Simulator" is pretty silly and kind of pejorative but it seems to be what people are ok with calling the genre.
Glad you enjoyed my long post lol. Feel free to reply to me/send me a message about the podcast if you want to discuss it. I have some other random thoughts about the show. Every once in a while in the show you can tell that they're making a Trump comparison, I can't think of specific examples but some of Herman's rants had some serious "2016 lib complaining about trump" energy. I actually don't mind the comparisons that much in this show since they're kind of justified with all the similarities. They're both demagogic celebrities that talk about America first. It feels like they avoid the dumb "isn't this just like Trump?" that a lot of media can fall into.
Also I totally forgot that the creator of this show, David Simon, also made The Wire which I've never watched but have heard a lot of good things about even from leftists. Just from reading about it definitely criticizes capitalism directly which is nice.
I just found this line on his Wikipedia page
During a November 2013 speech at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney, he said that America has become "a horror show" of savage inequality as a result of capitalism run amok, and that "unless we reverse course, the average human being is worth less on planet Earth. Unless we take stock of the fact that maybe socialism and the socialist impulse has to be addressed again; it has to be married as it was married in the 1930s, the 1940s and even into the 1950s, to the engine that is capitalism."
I think that quote explains what his intention was with Hermann. He gets so close but he just can't imagine the end of capitalism. I do wonder if this is just a pragmatic stance or if he is legitimately opposed to getting rid of capitalism if given the opportunity. I still think the show is great and obviously the creator's intention isn't everything when it comes to a show with so many people working on it. I do think Alvin is a more solid leftist character. He never really explains his political beliefs but his unapologetic anti-fascism no matter where he is in the show is something I can get behind.
I saw it a while ago I'm glad someone is discussing it here, I've been curious what people here think about it. I really enjoyed it myself. It's incredibly well made and I like that it keeps the focus on a small family with only occasional glimpses into what's actually going on in the Lindbergh presidency. Bengelsdorf is a really great portrayal of how individuals within minority groups can convince themselves that they can do good work within an administration that hates them. The show does a great job of showing how wrong Bengelsdorf is and that he gains nothing by working with Lindbergh.
The show definitely feels like it was made mostly from a liberal perspective, but not overwhelmingly so. Herman says in one scene that he voted for Eugene Debs and that he only barely tolerates his one of friend's political views because they voted for FDR which is pretty great so the show seems somewhat receptive to leftist ideas. Hermann definitely comes across as a somewhat misguided socialist who puts a lot of faith into U.S. institutions and really believed that FDR was genuinely good for socialists in America. I can't tell if the writers also genuinely believe this or if they're just writing him that way. I'm probably just judging it a bit to hard in that area though, a lot of actual socialists during that time period probably thought the same way although there were exceptions In general though I think they do a good job of showing what a fascist America would look like during that time period. It wouldn't be quite as mask off as the Nazis but would still have awful policies like the "Just Folks" program. Lindbergh himself never openly says that he hates Jews but his rhetoric is very clearly anti-Semitic and he surrounds himself with known anti-Semites like Henry Ford.
To answer a few of your questions, America had a large number of antiwar and specifically pro isolationism movements at the time. Even after the invasion of Poland it was still seen as an European affair and the Great Depression and memories of WW1 made many people take an anti war stance. Pearl harbor doesn't happen in this timeline likely because of Lindbergh active trading with the axis powers making Japan's oil shortage less acute which means that there's never an inciting incident brining the U.S. into the war. Before Pearl Harbor it was clear that Roosevelt wanted to go to war, but felt that he would not have support from the public/congress. So I think it's not that there is a lot of pro-Nazi sentiment in the U.S. (Although there was a fair amount, including Lindbergh himself) but that the isolationist movement is what really helps America stay out of the war in this timeline. This page is pretty helpful if you don't know about the America First movement and Lindbergh's involvement with it. Its basically what the show/book is based on, what if this movement was influential enough to elect someone president?
The votes are definitely being rigged for whoever the Lindbergh successor is. They definitely wanted to make the point that just because people are voting doesn't mean that the election will be fair and that good people will prevail. It's a great message and one that's almost impossible not to connect to current events. I do wish they had pushed this idea a little bit harder but I do think you can interpret Hermann as being too complacent just because he voted but I'm not sure if that's intentional. Its also worth noting that they changed the ending from the book. In the book FDR wins the emergency election and then Pearl Harbor happens shortly after, basically setting things back to normal. The ending they went with in the show is definitely a lot better and shows that they wanted a different message than the "everything just goes back to normal" message that the book gives.
I would recommend the companion podcast for the show. They go into a lot of depth about the various Jewish traditions and themes that they work into the show which is really interesting to learn about. The creator of the show is a bit of a lib sometimes but he has an okay message about how people need to be vigilant to protect democracy in the show and in real life. I would agree with him if we lived in an actual democracy and not our shitty American democracy lmao.
I would argue that its actually the opposite. The game is fairly anti-imperialist at points. I haven't played it in a while but I'll try explaining my thoughts. I've been wanting to make a post about Bastion for a while so this is probably going to be pretty long.
Spoilers for Bastion
spoiler
When you first meet Zia she is playing the song "Build That Wall" which describes how the Ura, the native people of the world that bastion takes place in, are going to dig their holes and wait until they can destroy Caelondia, and that any attempts by Caelondia such as building walls are futile. Here's the lyrics if you want to read them. Zia is shown to be an ally throughout the game so I definitely think the developers want you to sympathize with the message. Zulf, the other Ura character is intially shown to be two-faced, inviting himself to the Bastion only to destroy it, but I think he's pretty justified since the Bastion could be another superweapon designed to destroy the Ura just like the last machine the Caelondians built. Even though Zulf is initially portrayed as a villain, I think its pretty clear that he actions are because of his justified hatred of Caelondians considering the whole attempted genocide. If you choose to spare Zulf, the Ura stop fighting you and the song Mother, I’m Here plays which is a really emotional song about Zulf's acceptance of death that helps humanize him. Rucks/the narrator is an fairly evil character despite the fact that he seems so friendly on the surface. He's defintly using The Kid to rebuild the bastion for him and purposefully obfuscates the Bastion's true purpose. He's also distrustful if not outright racist towards the Ura which is why it can somewhat hard to see the positive aspects of the Ura since Rucks is one of your only sources of information about the world. His desire to use the Bastion to travel back in time is a pretty reactionary view, It could be that he doesn't believe that Caelondians could have caused the world to end and he just wants to go back to the way things used to be. The obvious flaw with this plan is that once this time travel has happened, no one remembers anything that happened and thus can't even try to prevent it from happening which eventually leads to the exact same events happening again. Rucks is most likely aware of this and just doesn't care, he just can't stand living in a reality where his pro-imperialist views have been so thoroughly destroyed. In conclusion, he is quite literally an unreliable narrator. Everything I'm saying about Rucks I'm assuming is at least partially intended by the devs. He's supposed to be a conservative that wants to literally return to an imagined better past. The final choice of either traveling back in time or flying away is an interesting choice because a character you just spent the whole game and trust deeply at this point is trying to convince you to make the wrong decision. The traveling back in time ending is not portrayed as a good ending for all the reasons I described, It's designed to be an awful ending for the game and that's completely normal.
To more directly answer your question, Rucks is definitely a pretty shitty person and leads the player to some pretty awful conclusions about the world through his dialogue that could be considered somewhat fascist in nature. Since he's basically 90% of the game's storytelling, it can seem like the game as a whole is leading you down some awful conclusions. However, when you go against Rucks by sparing Zulf and deciding not to go back in time, the game rewards you with much better outcomes, quite literarily rewarding you with music in the case of sparing Zulf since you don't get to hear his song if you leave him to die. In my view, the devlopers intended for you to have a strong bond with Rucks since you spend so much time with him only to have this relationship deeply questioned near the end of the game by having him advocate for terrible decisions.
To briefly tackle your question from another angle, from interviews/their other games I don't think anyone at Supergiant is right-wing in any way. They don't explicitly put politics into their games and there has never been any sort of controversy involving their politics from what I've seen.
Hopefully that wasn't too wordy and I got my general point across. I'm not trying to dunk on you at all by making this post. I've been wanting to talk about the story of Bastion for a while and this seemed like a good opportunity to do so. This is all just my interpretation of the story and you're free to disagree with me on any of my points.