We offer our sincere apologies for the error. This was an oversight in our choice of research sources--we should have consulted people closer to your homeland, and fewer generations removed.
Development on this game ceased years ago, but this is a serious enough mistake that it is worth temporarily resuming development to address. We will release a patch to resolve this and some smaller cultural issues in the coming weeks.
I'm glad you've been enjoying the game! I understand your feelings about that route in Aurentin and I appreciate your perspective. I anticipated this might be controversial, and I don't expect to convince you, but I feel like I should at least explain what my thinking was for writing it that way.
(Spoilers ahead.)
One of the many historical inspirations for that route, and for the design of the Auric setting in general, was the fate of the children of Nazis whose parents were killed in WWII, many of who emigrated to countries in South America, changed their names, and disappeared into the local population. As I myself am a descendant of specific people who participated in crimes against humanity--which, without getting into detail, were part of a terrible historical moment absolutely comparable in scale and inhumanity to the Holocaust--the stories I found of assimilated immigrants rediscovering their lost heritage and discovering that their parents and ancestors had committed terrible atrocities in their homeland resonated with me. Revelations like this dramatically affect how people born within a diaspora internalize their treatment by local people in a new country, and how their heritage fits into their personal identity. Such context can change the theme of a person's struggle as an immigrant, and indeed the theme of their entire life, from self-determination to transgenerational atonement.
For this conflict to be reflected meaningfully in the game I needed to give Athena (and the player) options in how to process this information into her identity and her struggle against her own oppression, which accurately reflect both historical examples and my own lived experience. That meant leaving in the choice for Athena to become a Nazi herself...if only so it would actually mean something, with real stakes, if she refused it.
The Auric Riders are not Nazis, they are the children of Nazis. The communities that the historical children of Nazis emigrated to often didn't make that distinction, and the result was sometimes adults who became fierce opponents of what their parents stood for, and sometimes it was more Nazis. I am sorry for putting you in the uncomfortable position of empathizing with them, even though making people uncomfortable is exactly what this game is intended to do.
In the game's launch marketing I emphasized that this game would not just be a feel-good story about heroic immigrants rising up against the oppression of local bigots, because sometimes the context behind true immigrant stories is much more complicated than the origin myths that second-generation immigrants are told. That marketing never reached customers who bought the game through the bundle, and I apologize that this wasn't communicated well on the itch.io store page.
Apologies for the delay. There seems to be a conflict between Steam's
policy around distributing keys and itch.io's policy for supplying
Steam keys with purchases. I contacted itch.io support about this a
while back but have yet to hear back from them.
Since it may be a while before this issue is resolved, I have
manually requested a Steam key for you. You should receive it within a few hours.
1. The game autosaves after each ingame day, at the end of the Night phase. This is meant to discourage savescumming.
2. This was originally a deliberate choice—the names are meant to draw you to countries that resonate with your real-world experience, and we wanted players to not really know what they were getting into (just like real immigrants often do). But feedback has shown that this vagueness keeps some immigrant players from identifying countries that reflect their own heritage. We are considering adding country descriptions in a future patch.
