the opening montage of Up really destroyed a whole generation's concept of effective nonverbal storytelling by making them think a parade of prefab domestic clichés embellished with flavorless Milestone clipart set to overbearing music is in any way sophisticated or interesting huh

this girl is a tasteless unfuckable dweeb and i wish her all the worst. the way she's simultaneously a self-insert wish fulfillment character AND the most hapless and bland cozycore dork imaginable is really dark tbh. inexcusable taste in stuffed animals! stop decorating with your diploma already you absolute MONSTER!!! When a sappy celeste-adjacent chiptune ballad plays as it's revealed via context clues that she came into her own after a trip to Japan (and returned w/ a bevvy of basic tourist kiosk tchotchkes) and now feels confident enough to explore rockabilly-lite fashion...hell. It's all so flavorless and antiseptic--she is 30 where the hell is her hitachi wand and why CANT i stuff her horrid garb into the closet in the ideal organizational format--the pile? the subject here is so unpalatable that i honestly would have preferred they scrap the whole progressing narrative concept entirely (esp. when its used in such an unambitious way that communicates very little beyond trite sentimentality; life has its ups and downs, #gratitude, don't make time for haters who dull your shine, the more things change the more they stay the same, when god throws out a mug he buys you a wacom tablet) and instead present a medley of varying rooms/spaces occupying a plethora of subjects, aesthetics, and experiences, but also idt the same devs who chose this protag have anywhere near the worldliness or savvy to attempt something like that. impressive amount of unique isometric assets and cool implementation of foley though!

wanderer above the sea of fog above the 45th boss arena above the medieval fort archipelago adjacent to the nodal sprinkling of challenge tower/upgrade caves in conversation with the impenetrable questline diaspora above the ancient pagan city above the ancienter pagan plague swamp above ash lake above the fromsoftware slurpee dispenser of mass effect 3 endings

Frightfully fun, often peerlessly gorgeous devourer of my finite life! Truly engrossing and addictive for its often well masked vacuity and kind of horrifying that this and FFXIV will likely end up being the longest single campaigns of any story I've ever experienced. I like it I love it I want some more or it and dear god I hate myself

God bless Harmony Korine's DmC!!!!!!

Fashion Model Cole Mohr stars in a fascinating time capsule of the last dying gasp of the late 2000's misanthropic Hot Topic nu-metal scene that existed between the downfall of VH1 and the looming rise of ~ influencer culture ~ !!!!!!!! SKRILLEX IS MY LIFE and the CW's Supernatural RULES and iM noT a PaWn 2 MaSs mEdiA and vocally slut shaming Paris Hilton/the Kardashians and wanting them to Graphically Die is mega awesome and ok actually!!!! if this came out 3 years later it would have like a Swaggy Kpop Raver vibe and if it came out now it would probably just be Assassination Nation or Euphoria!!! it is a total reflection of such an era-specific "atrocious corporate content 4 edgy teenz" attitude and i LOVE THAT ABOUT IT as an anthropological artifact AND as like a bizarro world version of the original DMC series and its own dedication to (an also very strange concept of) sTyLE!!!!!! IMO this is a legitimately interesting, if kind of vomitous and inexcusable, piece of the cultural record because of how well it encapsulates all these puerile and venomous trends across SO many axes!! We need 2 maintain a historical record of our aesthetic crimes so as never 2 repeat them!!!!

also it's pretty decently put together and a totally solid action game!

(Note: I am just putting a general content warning here as I feel that is the right thing to do.)

Everything this game tries to tell you is all wrong.

And yes, it is a game. When I was really young, I had a passion to try and make an adventure game and I used this really awful little program called TADS to make a demo for something called Gates to Purgatory. I only coded a starting area, some basic puzzles and interactions, and an "ending." After that I never touched it again. You can still view the TIGsource thread for it and even play it. (Don't play it.) It's nothing but a bunch of nonsense text, but I still consider it a work of art; a work of creativity. We can argue at length about the intrinsic qualities of art, what constitutes art, what constitutes specific types of art. Entire schools of philosophy discussing these intangibles but in the end its easiest to default to broad interpretations.

Maybe there is no real art to either my game or Notch's, but there is "passion"; in Drowning in Problems there is a passion to appear extremely profound, a passion to sound smarter than everyone else, a passion to express how much of a tortured soul you are. Notch released this in 2014, the same year he jumped ship from Mojang and the creation that had made him a literal millionaire. The game's thesis boiled down to the absolute futility of life and death- baby's first rumination on nihilism. Nothing matters, what's the point?

I went through this exact same conversation with myself well into my mid-20s, dealing with the worst depression of my life. Two inpatient stays, many medical leaves, some broken hearts (I guess it would be 3 on Drowning's meter). I don't look back at this as a deficiency, but I learned from it and grew from it. Notch was 35 years old and rich as hell, and two years later he decided to double down on his prejudices towards the others he felt had somehow wronged him. Going into social media tirades and projecting his own extreme self-hatred on people much more at risk than he is. Notch can pay for therapy. The entire groups of people he chose to antagonize and target, a lot of them cannot. He never learned or grew from Drowning in Problems, he just channeled it into cruelty. This is one of the major problems with adults who choose to be defeatist and nihilist; when all that discontent and dissatisfaction gets funneled through the pipeline of hatred.

You get +Body at the start of this game... there are people who are born into this world without a fully functioning body, or mind. People who can never walk, talk, see. What does Notch propose here? That they have even less in their inventory were we to gamify their existences? There are people born with nothing. Born without any of the comforts or conveniences that you and I share, who still choose to greet each day with courage and strength. People in Gaza are drowning in more than just self-pity and yet they continue to resist in the face of overwhelming death and despair. If nothing matters, what's the point of them doing what they are doing?

Life is worth much, much more than Notch implies it to be. You do not need to be told that what you do doesn't matter. Your actions will affect people no matter what. This tantrum of his could come from the most sincere place of extreme depression and that would not change anything about how fundamentally wrong it is. When I was depressed, I didn't go around telling other people they didn't matter. I felt that about myself, but it was all a product of extreme self-hatred. I knew even then how irresponsible it was to extrapolate my own psychosis and apply it uncritically to everyone else. With the benefit of hindsight, it just feels like Notch is trying to absolve himself of the consequences of having to exist in a world that is always going to be "political" in the way he didn't want it to be.

Just like Notch himself, Drowning in Problems is trash, and as such, belongs to the dustbin of history.

I love this sullen, gangly, size zero interpretation of shinobi. I love the freezeframe bisection polyptychs, the d'n'b soundtrack, and the mobility. it's an exceptionally stylish, confident game, and while a lot of folks have already said it: when it works it really works

the big draw past the point when you're no longer in awe of its scarf physics and relentless bangers is the tate (殺陣; fatal wind) mechanic. it's like the chip BURST chip dynamic modern action games love, only instead of an mmo-grade phase rotation it's more of a split second setplay puzzle where the "burst" is seeing an entire health bar explode in a single hit while you go full vogue

each successive kill within a four second window builds power and prolongs the chain until it's ready to come together for the photogenic finish. it's the most shinobi shit on the planet, and when everything plays out the way you planned you immediately forget how much the camera made you wanna bite the controller as hard as you could ten seconds prior. you no longer wanna send magazine cutout letters to the guy who decided the wretched lock-on should only target stuff you've never seen before. you might even find it in your heart to forgive the paul ws anderson lasers (I actually kinda liked em!)

main knock against it's that the levels & encounters are borderline procgen. on 3A I was getting a bit dozy and for a second there you could've successfully convinced me I was playing persona 4. there's no discernable sense of structure or pacing to the stages; they go on, cycle through a handful of identical rooms with identical enemy setups, and then a boss shows up whenever the mappers felt there were enough empty boxes, shiba dogs, and bottomless pits to call it a day

but the one thing that puts a bullet in the idea of replaying it on higher difficulties is the final boss. I hate this hocus pocus motherfucker. iframes and teleports out the ass, flying minions with wonky hurtboxes, one of those long intro sequences where the real fight doesn't start til you're a minute in. the sighs and groans I made when he decided to spin like a beyblade every time I managed to get the 8-chain going were downright ancestral -- real cave creature shit. I never wanna do that again, and I probably never will

happy to have played it but happy to be done. I hate mages so much man, you don't even know

the community tanking this game's reputation by suggesting that everyone play a version that makes the level and encounter design infinitely worse makes me so upset. surpasses the original in every way for me personally, whether that's in the world, bosses, or even characters you meet along your journey. please don't fucking play scholar though that shit made me hate this game for the longest time. and also just because miyazaki wasn't the director doesn't mean the game is automatically bad lol, souls doesnt start and end with him in the director's chair as the end all be all, and dark souls 2 is proof of that.

considering WotC and chimera squad were already Figurative Marvel Shit, the pivot to Literal Marvel Shit is about the least surprising thing ever; if you didn't see this coming I suggest staying out of the entrail reading business. the real surprise here's that everyone buried the lede blubbering about deckbuilding stuff so thoroughly that I had no idea this was Meet n Fuck Marvel

not since borderlands 2 has a game's dialogue filled me with the primal unease of an ape seeing a particularly snakelike vine. started this up while my wife was in the shower and when she texted asking if I could make some coffee I knew the choice was to smash ALT+F4 or risk being divorced on the spot

the cardgame bit I'm kinda whatever about. I think I'd like it more if the camera was positioned anywhere else and it didn't lean so hard into Epic Cinematic Presentation that even the most basic actions take a century to unfold. it's cool you can do the type of MTG blue deck bullshit where your turn lasts so long the person on the other side of the table regrets being a nerd, but not cool enough to endure the simpering social layer, endless cutscenes, and deranged tutorializing that make up the bulk of the game

have to imagine you'd have a better time stuffing hulk hands in your ass while playing slay the spire

...I AM A ROCKSTAR!
Oh man, this is gonna be a tough review. There's so much I love about this game, so much it might be a new favorite of mine. Okay let's get into it...

Our game opens with the protag, Chai, jamming out to The Black Keys and waiting in line to get into Project Armstrong, an effort by Vandelay Technologies to give robotic prosthetics to those needing of them. One surgery later, and he's got a new arm... and a MP3 player in his chest? AND KILLER ROBOTS AFTER HIM?? Seems something went awry! However, it's not all bad, as said MP3 player has integrated itself into his new robot arm and is giving him strange musical superpowers. Not wanting to get killed by robots, he heads out to look for an exit.

This leads me into the gameplay and oh my god it's so good. I suck at rhythm games and I suck at most hack n' slashes, but put em together and you have a match that could rival peanut butter and chocolate. It's hard to describe, the feeling of landing combos, the shouts of "HEY! HEY! CHAI! HEY!" as you turn robots into scrap metal, it all...rocks!! Although there are a few things that annoy me, mostly enemies with shields. Enemies with shields require you to summon your friends, Peppermint and Macaron to break them for you (oh and Macaron can be especially annoying since his shield take two attacks to break and his attack takes the longest to recharge). Oh, and speaking of characters...

The characters are one part of Hi-Fi Rush that didn't grab me at first. Chai and our deuteragonist, Peppermint, start rather annoying. One an annoying dumbass, the other an annoying smartass. It's not until we meet Macaron and his robot buddy CNMN (pronounced cinnamon) that things get good. Chai and Peppermint go through some development, 808 is adorable, Macaron is a big lovable teddy bear, and CNMN is deadpan in all the right ways while still having a lot of heartwarming moments. The heads of Vandelay are a lot of fun too. Rekka is pro-wrestler turned boss with anger issues, Zanzo is a massive JoJo reference that you beat by draining him of all his budget, Korsica is probably taken the most serious by the game, Mimosa is and egocentric diva with a fantastic boss fight, Roquefort is a no-nonsense grumpy old man with an even BETTER boss fight, and Kale is the big bad, evil as hell, multimillionaire who you really want to punch in the face. All and all, the cast is amazing and fit the games tone to a T. I would get into the story, but most of the actually reveals are character based and spoilery, most of the actual story is just "Corpation plans to use robot limbs to mind control people, go stop em" and to be honest, that's all I need for a game like this.

OH SHIT I ALMOST FORGOT TO TALK ABOUT THE SOUNDTRACK! HOW DID I FORGET!? Uh...the soundtrack is really good! I tend to have a hard time talking about music other than "it's good!" or "it fits the tone!" and Hi-Fi Rush's music does both of those, but something about it just feels GOOD. The original tracks are amazingly made and the licensed tracks fit the mood perfectly. A part near the end set to Whirring by The Joy Formidable almost made me cry while I was playing.

So, that's Hi-Fi Rush, a game that is now one of my most favorites. I could gush about it for a few paragraphs but I feel like I'd either end up spoiling the game or repeating myself. I love this game with every fiber of being and I'm so glad I got to play it. How sadly ironic that Tango Gameworks fell to very villain of this game. Fuck you microsoft.

cherishes human connection in an endearingly immature way. very quaint but also overbearingly self-conscious in its approach to standard conventions, sometimes to a fault? “design by subtraction” sounds genius on paper, though to me it can lend itself to one of two mentalities in execution. it pushes the player towards experimentation; resulting in immense satisfaction when success occurs due to intuitive forward-thinking, or the absence of any emotion at all in triumph as the logic of the solution may have never transpired within the player. thankfully i think ico manages to lean more towards the former overall with only a few moments that underwhelmed my train of thought. the inquisition of the existence of swinging on chains was that of satisfaction. i noticed when jumping on chains that they’d naturally swing back and forth a little, so i figured there was a way to voluntarily execute that on my own and voilà! the action button had answered my prayers. in opposition to this, much later into the game you’re required to blow up the base of a water tower to progress, as for some reason when its blown up part of the tower conveniently falls to form a bridge leading to the next part of the area. this seemed odd to me because there’s… no indication this would happen and i dont think the average person would assume it’d either. you just throw a bomb at the tower because in the scenario there’s no other options of what to do. this was a time where i was met with dissatisfaction in puzzle solving. even if it is kinda minor it still racked my brain a bit.

anyway i believe this “subtraction” psychology applies to more than just the diminishing of useless aspects that dont add to the artist’s vision. namely it contributes to the progression. frequently we’re paraded with the great expanse of the castle utilizing overhead views and wide shots. in continuing our journey we inherently subtract the unknown of that expanse, and perhaps any fears of it that had construed our view of it. i suppose any action in the (or any) game can be interpreted as a subtraction. subtracting enemies, problems, etc etc…

some further things i had noted…
i was heavily reminded of love-de-lic and cing’s work while invested, i think mainly because of the childlike innocence on display in both of our protagonists alongside the organic vibes of the atmosphere respectively. ico’s selflessness struck me in a similar way to moon’s main character and yorda that of another code’s ashley.
the deprivation of any music aside from minor points is an oddly fitting choice that i appreciate a lot. im a sucker for nature ambience and this is no exception. in a way it kept me grounded throughout the entire experience.
the first time i was met with the blissful save theme it had sounded awfully familiar, within seconds my mind uttered “Based God sampled this!” precisely in Flowers Rise on batshit insane mixtape GODS FATHER. i fucking love that tape man i’ll take any chance i can get to shill it.

this was a really resonant experience for me and i’m glad i finally got to this one. i definitely see where people like taro and miyazaki were influenced here. in the industry nowadays you can still feel tremors that this game insinuated way back when (for better or for worse). brilliant display of the importance of environmental attention to detail.

This was a forward thinking megawad for '97. Not only does it display a number of technical tricks, it utilizes things that would become popularized in the ensuing decades like the use of tying the end of one level to the beginning of the next.

The megawad was known for its size back when it was released. Not only are its levels bigger than Downtown from DOOM 2, most of its levels are like Downtown in how long it takes to complete them. It's like the devs wanted to cram the most game out of a single wad.

That makes the wad very exhausting to play, however, especially since this is a megawad from the early days of DOOM mapping and good navigation wasn't an idea that had been popularized yet. The switch hunting is out of control and there are times where you have to find doors that don't even look like doors. I think there were some mandatory secrets in there, too.

This game is a curiosity because it's a full early DOOM megawad that is doing some cool things but I quit halfway through because trying to figure out what the hell to do was too frustrating.

I don't like the descriptor "self-obsessed" to describe art.

Both because I think the mere act of creating art requires a little bit of benign self-obsession, and because it's often used by luddites to shout down art they perceive as 'pretentious' or somesuch nonsense.

With that in mind, Fallout 3 has a moderate problem with being self-obsessed.

It is a game that mostly consists of hallway shooting galleries, quests where the moral choices are "basic decency" and "laugh in a child's face after tricking him into putting on a bomb collar", and doesn't really possess much in the way of clever jokes beyond pop culture references and human suffering- hey wait

It's juvenile, to put it briefly.

But between the constant invocation of the Bible, the main story rapidly becoming about some grand purpose, your birth and childhood being the introduction, Three Dog endlessly praising a good/neutral player for being the singular hero that'll save the day, and thousands of other little tidbits, it's clear as day that the writers have an overinflated sense of how profound they think this is.

Before we continue, I think it's prudent that I go back in time for a little bit, and talk about both myself and the game at launch.

I'm a very old Fallout fan. So old in fact that I can't even talk about the sites I visited in any depth; they're all still around and their history entirely public - it'd be tantamount to doxxing. My opinions on the series are coloured by about 17 years of discontent and relative loathing for Bethesda Fallout as a creative force.

Fallout 3 dropped in October 2008 - exact date is beyond me - and it was much beloved by everyone except me and my fellow embittered old fans. At first this discontent was merely "they changed it!" but for me, at least, it's only grown due to far more valid complaints.

There is, however, one complaint that Fallout 3 fans and haters alike had back in the day.

See, it's profoundly difficult to stumble upon the base version of Fallout 3 these days. Microsoft sell the GOTY edition for cheaper than the basegame on Xbox, and on Steam it's the only option available to buy. If you purchase Fallout 3, there's a 99% chance it's the whole package.

From the game's release until it's 1st anniversary, Broken Steel did not exist. Without it, the game's main story simply ended. This seems inoffensive on the surface and when spoken so plainly the idea of it being contentious must seem ludicrous.
The catch here is that Fallout 3's story is very short. If one decides to dabble in it, they can easily reach the end in a couple hours potentially by accident. This in itself often poses a problem, as it's entirely possible to be locked into that ~endgame state~ and corresponding building just by chasing the main story as a diversion.
It's the story itself that's the draw here, though. Fallout 3's writers were obsessed with how grandiose, spiritual and hashtag epic the story was, so it ends with either you sacrificing yourself to turn on a water purifier or making someone else do it as the token evil option.

If you use social media a decent amount and are either in or adjacent to game circles, you might've seen the companion reactions to being asked to go into the Purifier. They're bad, and the radiation-immune companions give the most asspull reactions possible.

About a month or two after Fallout 3's release, Bethesda announced a trio of DLCs: Operation Anchorage, The Pitt and Broken Steel.
Broken Steel drew a lot of curiosity pre-release for one simple reason: A promise of being able to play past the ending.
It's somewhat "common knowledge" that this was Bethesda violently backtracking and while we'll never know the truth, I personally make it a point to remind people that Fallout 3's DLCs were planned before release and the development only wrapped the same month it released.

Broken Steel, for me, is a bit of a morbid curiosity. I would love to know more about it and I'm eternally sad that the developers at Bethesda are so culturally and creatively exsanginuated, for it makes finding out their influences/objectives/desires so much harder compared to, say, New Vegas characters.

To break it down for you: I don't know what the fuck Bethesda were thinking with this DLC.

Sure, Fallout 3's base ending is terrible. It's incredibly overdramatic for the game it's in, utterly defies and resists any attempts to interrogate it, reeks of Great Man Theory, and railroads the player in an already railroad-y game.
But when you swing for the fences and hit manure, the most noble thing you can do is commit. I have respect for plenty of creatives who make something terrible, stand their ground and go "Fuck you. This is what I wanted to make." It's why I take few potshots at indie projects and millions at Bioware.
Broken Steel's greatest sin is its existence: It's a backtrack. It's Bethesda flinching. It's a wordless apology. Cowardice in megabyte form. Doesn't matter if it was a planned move or a reactive one, because it simply is, and that's the worst part. There is simply no winning here: If it was planned, then surprise! Bethesda don't really care about the products they make and will cynical lobotomize them to sell DLC. If it wasn't planned, then within a month of release they hastily scrabbled to lobotomize their game so they could scramble to regain the mild amount of goodwill they lost.

...But you know what? Even if we ignore that it's ideological wafer, or that I'm an ornery old Fallout fan who's distrusted people with Enclave avatars since before my nieces and nephews were born, Broken Steel is just... bad on a design level.

For starters, it adds three new enemies to the Wasteland: Feral Ghoul Reavers, Super Mutant Behemoths, and Albino Radscorpions. These are... Remodelled and higher level variants of the three most common enemy types in the Wasteland. They have significantly higher health pools (the largest behind Behemoths) and get a passive +35 to their damage output that bypasses all of your armor. Besides this they're not very engaging to fight. You either kill them fast or they kill you fast. Riveting.

The 'main story' of the DLC is horrifically grim even by the standards of Fallout 3's own main story. Having given up all pretense of even telling a story, the player is shoved into a military campaign against the Enclave which moooooooooostly just manifests as more hallway shooter segments and another lackluster, somewhat cringe section with Liberty Prime. If you've not visited Old Olney yet, the second main quest awkwardly pushes you there to collect the associated loot. After that, another shooter segment that's even easier than the ones from past DLCs because it's 80% open fields - and the game hands you an absurdly powerful weapon that uses ammo so plentiful even casual players can amass thousands. Bang bang bang, make a 'moral choice' (nuke the Enclave or the BoS) and off you go.

That's... Basically it? Besides some inconsequential side quests, some loot that's mediocre for how late it appears, and the level cap increase, Broken Steel really isn't all that substantial despite the implications of its name.

Maybe the real Broken Steel was the antipathy we made along the way.

Okay nevermind my Operation Anchorage review.

Coming back to it as an adult with a fully formed brain and an actual belief system, The Pitt is my least favourite FO3 expansion by a country mile.

In part because while the others are bad, The Pitt is both bad and actually offensive.

Fallout 3 already has problems with invoking the imagery and motifs of American Slavery - a very real thing that scarred entire generations for about three centuries, killed hundreds of thousands of very real people and ruined tons of very real countries - while attempting to be impartial and ~nonpolitical~.
Fallout 2 is a dogshit-ass game that I have little love for, but when it brought slavery into the equation it had the correct idea of not invoking the Civil Rights Movement and associated iconography.
Fallout 3 had no such wisdom, which means you use an "underground Railroad movement" to free uh... A white man. Hey fun fact, the black leader of the escaped slaves - Hannibal Hamlin - is white in his ending slide

The Pitt doubles down on this in the worst way possible: By trying to Both Sides slavery.

Let's just lay out Ishmael Ashur's whole deal, right?

Ashur is an insane but erudite ex-Brotherhood religious zealot who, upon seeing a city dominated by endless hordes of cannibalistic murder-rapist Raiders, decided it would be best if he built a manufacturing empire out of its corpse. This empire is built with slave labor. Lots and lots and lots of slave labor. Slave labor that, given Ashur buys from Fallout 3's slave labor, almost certainly includes children too. These slaves die at such a rapid pace that external slavers are struggling to fulfill the shipment quotas thanks the horrific meat treadmill Ashur runs.
This regime is enforced by a system of eugenics (wherein slaves aren't allowed to have children), propaganda (in which Ashur promises all this is a "temporary measure" and that slaves can "earn" their freedom in brutal gladiator battles) and a caste of ex-raiders who - despite Ashur's alleged reformation - are still murderous rapists that are far too eager to torture, kill or maim slaves.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand The Pitt wants you to consider him a valid choice against his opponent.

Wernher is a bit of a dick, he's blunt and to the point at all times. He doesn't really care about the slaves but is entirely willing to free them for his goals. All he asks of you is that you steal a baby.

"WHOA!" Said most of the gaming landscape and also all of FO3's writers. "Stealing a baby is fucked up. This is such a morally grey choice."

But to take The Pitt's main dilemma as a morally choice is to not at all interrogate the seting, which is a really embarassing thing to happen when you wrote it.

Let's just interrogate it right here, shall we? Fun teambuilding exercise.

The core conceit of this allegedly "morally grey choice" is that Marie, as a literal baby, is innocent of the sins of her parents and thus shouldn't be subject to harm as a means to punish them. This is fair on its own, but to take that at face value means either deliberately or incidentally having major blindspots.
First of all, despite Wernher declarig he doesn't give a shit about Marie's health, it's also stated more than a few times that Midea - her carer if you side with the slaves - is looking after her during the experiments... Experiments which also happen if you side with Ashur.
Secondly, The Pitt naturally doesn't bother depicting child slavery - ostensibly due to developer cowardice - even though it's abundantly clear that's a thing given the connection between Paradise Falls (a place that sells to The Pitt and has numerous child slaves) and The Pitt, plus The Pitt is infinitely larger than is depicted ingame. With that in mind, one has to ask: What makes Marie more entitled to safety than the child slaves that're almost certainly a part of Ashur's great 'empire'? Sure, she's a baby, but this machine has already trampled over the corpses of children.
Third, and perhaps the most impactful question: What happens to the children born of Ashur's slaves? I like this one because there's no answer that makes the slavers look good. If the children are enslaved, then there's the obvious caveat; they're enslaving children. If the children are free, then the slavers steal children from their parents to be indoctrinated as brutal, amoral raiders. How is it worse, then, to steal a baby away to relative safety? It may not be squeaky clean, but no liberation movement ever was and the opposition are hardly innocent angels.

Ashur's sole defence when confronted with his crimes is that this is a "temporary, necessary measure" on the road to "emancipation" for everyone, which... does not work. At all.
To buy into this is to believe that Ashur's Raiders, with all their brutality and slavery and their entire arsenal of systemic oppression, would relinquish total control over The Pitt and elevate the slaves to a position of equality.
I regularly lay into Bethesda Fallout for being overly cynical garbage written by people who're emotionally still 14, but in the case of The Pitt I feel that cynicism has dug a grave for the story pre-emptively. If you take Bethesda Fallout at face value, it encourages the player to view things cynically and bitterly. Why should The Pitt get an exception? Nothing about this DLC stokes optimism.

It feels like this DLC was made by and for people who think Malcolm X was bad because he advocated for violent resistance, or think that any social movement is only valid so long as it remains entirely peaceful, quiet and out of mind. The core dilemma just falls apart entirely if questioned or interrogated at all, so while it might appeal to people who say the words "thinking too hard" about people who take videogames even slightly seriously, it must be pure brain poison to people who actually use that wet sack of meat inside their skull.

In other, less kind words: This DLC sucks doodoo shit and the writers should find jobs working as janitors in a kitchen - not chefs, because they clearly can't cook shit.

The only slightly redeeming part of this DLC is the Steel Ingot collectathon; a treasure hunt where you can scavenge up to 100 ingots in a map that's relatively well designed and may be the only cell in FO3 with any real thought in it. It's not very long if you, like me, have memorized the route, but the area it takes place in is relatively atmospheric and also conveniently disconnected from the overall conflict.

That the only good part is entirely detached from the rest of the DLC should be all the review you need, honestly.