Every carefully crafted game has a deliberately narrowed scope in service of a vision. The saving grace of such deliberate textual framing is that when it’s done well you might notice it, but it gives you a shared point of reference with others in conversation. Instead of e.g. discussing racism in abstract, we can talk about how Measurehead, despite being everything his worldview espouses, is still ultimately a tiresome pawn.

I totally cede the point about framing, but not the one about DE being effective propaganda. To me it reads more like the author had a lot of complex feelings about communism’s promise and its shortcomings.