Rather, DE does an interesting thing of keeping politics confined to the realm of characterization. Honestly I interpreted the game as having a recurring theme of how one should not want to be a wingcuck

The political "vision quests" demonstrate what I mean. At one point in the game you can choose to "lock in" being a fascist, communist, libertarian, or a centrist "moralist". Each ideology has its own quest, but these missions end up being largely meaningless. Communism just sends you to a book club obsessed with building a tower from one of their books out of matchboxes. Fascism has you stare into a mirror and pass an endurance check to see if you can make it as a hardline right-winger, but the only change from passing is that you just permanently scowl all the time. Being a laissez faire capitalist sends you on a quest to improve your net worth through speculative art, but of course it doesn't actually earn you a dime. Funnily enough only the neolib quest has a real ending — you get taken in by glowies for asking too many questions

The theme I took from this all this was that, in the end, your political ideology is only relevant to your characterization and does not change anything about the world. In a standard power fantasy RPG like New Vegas, it would coincide with something like joining one of the major factions and deciding the future of the setting. In DE it's more meaningless. Your internal beliefs don't change the fact that you're just a police detective, nothing more, and the main plot will always and quite simply revolve around the case you were assigned, the job you were hired to do. How you feel about it politically is mostly irrelevant.

Your political alignment only changes the kinds of people you interact with. As a fascist you run into wackos going on about esoteric racial theories and semen retention. As a commie you meet workers who don't understand it very well but think it might benefit them and then college activists who do understand theory but end up being useless fiction obsessed stoners. As a libertarian you're stuck making sales pitches to oddball artists in the hopes of patronizing a great work of speculative art that will dazzle the rich and improve your net worth, never mind that you're not actually providing a meaningful good or service. The centrist quest is more weird but I suppose there's still a theme there — aligning yourself with the reigning neolib government just means they'll absorb you as another potential asset, your character no longer being able to make an individual difference, no longer in control of his actions. (Or maybe they just kidnap you idk)

There's a sobering lesson in all this. Being very political as a common man doesn't really change much of anything about the world. It only meaningfully changes how other people will see you and the kinds of people you'll be stuck hanging out with. Isn't that a thought that easily applies to real life? Anyway, I thought the game was about not being so wingcucked all the time

And on the note you made about Harry's ex-wife, I like how DE almost seems to mock the idea of your standard RPG protagonist who has no backstory and basically doesn't exist until the player starts the game. At the start of DE you have amnesia and your internal schizo monologue encourages you to make a new name and personality for yourself.

But as the game goes on you will run into hints about who you were and why Harry turned to severe drinking and drug use. Eventually the past fully catches up to you, the ex-wife plot thread in particular being hard hitting for your character. It's telling that you often take health or morale damage when you learn snippets of your forgotten past.

A lot of this is meaningless to the player because it's all just part of this fictional setting, but the point the game is making is that it's relevant to your player character. It's downright mocking the idea that your rpg protagonist didn't have a life before you hit the start button, and that nothing from their past would ever show up again.

"Realistically", says DE, your rpg hero did have a life of their own within the setting, and that past is going to catch up with him even if it means interrupting the main narrative.

Anyway, those are some thoughts that came to mind. Sorry for writing your ear off

I think DE is a unique and memorable game and I appreciated it. My main criticism is that the murder mystery is a little whatever