I bought a friend Cassette Beasts and they stopped playing the minute it showed him pronouns. I called him a fucken bigot, convinced him to buy me the Elden Ring DLC, and I haven't touched it.
My friend group did a video game Secret Santa back in January. Incidentally, I think 6 out of the 7 games had some form of pronoun choice, with like 4/7 directly letting you choose and the other two being a character selector with fixed pronouns for the characters. Cassette Beasts was the first game opened, and there were quite a few references to that one streamer yelling about pronouns.
I didn't even know you could romance any partner you wanted or what that would even be like. The only experience I had with pronouns were the character select and it was just an option for they/them. Then Frankie, but you had to practically beat most of the game to see her and it doesn't outright say she is trans she just has a little trans pin on her bag. Totally avoidable I guess if you're a bigot. I gotta say I got down with my boy Barkley and never looked back. Dog over people any day.
To be fair cassette beasts is SUPER woke, and I love it. Very diverse cast, you can romance anyone (I think, I never selected those options), and one of your party members is literally a communist and his whole side quest is kicking landlords off the island (Eugene my beloved).
That game deserves some kind of award it was so damn good. I loved every character, place, sound. It was by all meanings of the word dope. It felt so human and that it was just made to be art.
Here's the problem, modern review systems have become some kind of stupid cultural football so I don't know if something is genuinely good or not though the review system.
I was looking at Homeworld 3 but the reviews are overwhelmingly negative, and they all read so wishy washy about it.
generally, on either Steam or Amazon, I find the negative reviews more useful – not for the actual reviews themselves, but the overall tone – if all the negatives are just whiny conservative pearl-clutchers then the game is going to be just fine – if all the negatives are talking about bugs, broken gameplay, unfinished storylines, predatory microtransactions then it’s more EA shovelware