To its credit, Legion doesn’t frame this rise in fascism as alternate universe hyperbole, instead treating this outcome as an obvious extension of the already odious character of those currently in power in the real world. Immigrants are detained en masse, the National Health Service is being dismantled, and new anti-terror laws eradicate privacy. In case you haven’t heard, here’s the pitch: In the near future, the UK has come under the control of an archconservative alliance of austerity minded politicians, anti-regulation big tech, privatized law enforcement, reactionary media corporations, and empire-nostalgic national intelligence services. Given all of that, absolute disinterest in Legion is more than deserved, and I have no interest in making the case that anyone should look past those reservations.) (It’s also doing that in a year when its Big Political Concerns have been front and center in our daily lives in resolutions greater than any graphics card can render, and a year in which Ubisoft’s authority as a studio that can opine on issues of equality and justice has been undercut by sexual misconduct cases, racism, and overall toxic culture which the company itself reports has made one-in-five employees feel disrespected or unsafe in the last two years.

Yet, Legion itself is being sold on the merits of its own whiz-bang technology, one that replaces (or at least supplements) a human touch with systemic, procedurally generated storytelling. Yes, in its best moments, the game is able to skewer the powerful for leveraging technologies of surveillance, control, and violence to address socio-economic problems instead of pursuing community-driven, human-first solutions. This idea-that leveraging technological solutions to solve cultural problems will always come up short-is core to Legion, though perhaps in more ways than intended.

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