the difference between good cynicism (A Clockwork Orange, No Longer Human) and juvenile cynicism is often that the former cannot be easily read as either didactically moral or immoral—the impossibility of this clarity itself being the source of cynicism—where the latter begets only nastiness and caricature.

The Lisa trilogy tells the story of three descendent patrilineal traumas, with the back half of games taking place in an entirely male-populated wasteland following the mysterious destruction of all women. Porn magazines become the new currency, and every surviving male falls somewhere along the spectrum between homicidal rapist and comparatively harmless gooner (i.e., no way any man would voluntarily identify themselves with). This is fine so long as the game occupies only the realm of levity: a comedic version of Children of Men. But trouble comes when this tendency towards totalizing negative psychology does not give way to any human truths.

That violence is cyclical and murdering people bad is true, but boring because it is a truism.

I struggle to think of Lisa as categorically cynical so much as outright misanthropic. It spells an incontrovertibly bummer text, which only seems all the more of a total downer taken as the middle child of a trilogy of games which are all essentially doomposts. The First teaching you that there is no escape from trauma, The Painful that nothing can amend it, and The Joyful that it'll persist even after you're gone. We witness this cross-generational story of suffering. This deterministic cycle of pain. All of this failed human potential for... well, what? Are these hard to swallow truths or an unhelpful and uninspired use of captial "T" trauma as a plot mechanism? The game really wants you to believe the former.

Jorgenson supposedly made Lisa with the mantra of making no statement. To depict things of no agenda whatsoever and as impartially as the programming that allows the game to run properly on computers. This, among anything that acutally happens throughout Lisa, is perhaps what is saddest.