Indie game review bombed for starring a woman who goes to university

Fellas, is it woke to go to school

Newfangled Games

Paper Trail, an indie game whose charm and creativity we praised in our Paper Trail review, is getting review bombed on Metacritic for *checks notes*  sending a girl to school. A Steam page called “Woke Content Detector” encouraged people to boycott the game, saying it “contains overtly pro-DEI messaging.”

Paper Trail is about a young woman who longs to study the stars at university, but whose parents – fearful of change – want to keep her home, with them, the same as always. Our heroine sneaks out one night and leaves to pursue her dream, and she can bend time, space, and the papercraft world around her at will, since it is a video game, after all. Being a woman and having ambitions is woke, apparently.

If you don’t know about these “detector” accounts, you spend much less time on the internet than the rest of us, which is probably for the better. The gist of it is that, earlier in 2024, a small group of loud and angry people started trying to boycott any game they perceived as “pushing” a diversity agenda – anything that featured folks who didn’t look, talk, and think exactly like them, in other words.

The movement – well, “effort” is a more appropriate term, since most of these accounts have few followers and even less influence – has had little lasting effect on the games industry outside an increase in vile comments on social media, but the Paper Trail instance was slightly different. 

Unfortunately after this tweet, our Metacritic got user review bombed from 8.0 to 5.4 ☹️https://t.co/JKvj1qaLwL https://t.co/JEOPSHQ3uS

— Huenry Hueffman (@HenryHoffman) August 5, 2024

Henry Hoffman, founder of Paper Trail studio Newfangled Games, mocked the people who put Paper Trail on the detector list, and Paper Trail started getting review bombed on Metacritic. Hoffman said that, from the time he made his comment on July 23, 2024, until early in the morning on Aug. 5, 2024, Paper Trail’s average user score dropped from 8.0 to 5.4, a potential issue if users just glance at consumer scores without reading anything else. 

Even that little action had as much impact as a fish urinating in the ocean, though. After Hoffman posted about the Metacritic, Paper Trail fans who hadn’t left reviews decided they weren’t going to stand for it and flooded the aggregator site with positive reviews. As of the time of publication, Paper Trail’s PS5 user scores are back up to 7.6, with 9.6 for mobile. The Nintendo Switch version remains at 5.4, though, with the last reviews coming in on July 24, 2024.