Elodie Does Syria

Between the collapse of the Islamic State’s territorial ambitions and the collective shrug of Western counter-terrorism policy, someone decided a dating simulator was the appropriate artistic response. Fuck ISIS—Super Patriotic Dating Simulator centers on Elodie, a 19-year-old blonde CIA agent who loves America, Lana Del Rey, and a fully charged iPhone, and who travels into the last shreds of the caliphate to screw the radicalization out of a rotating cast of very misunderstood religious fanatics—Husani, Omar, Yasir—by turning their heads and handling their circumcised dicks with professional dedication. Internal cleanup. From the inside out.

The premise is absurdist rather than hateful, the satire aimed less at Islam than at the notion that American soft power and raw sexual charisma can succeed where military hardware and drone strikes couldn’t. Which is not, I want to stress, the least coherent foreign policy thesis I’ve encountered in recent years. The game frames it as romance—actual human connection inside a geopolitical disaster zone—which is either very funny or quite dark depending on how you’re feeling about the world that week.

As provocations go, this one does real conceptual work. Whether the finished game earns its own setup is a separate question, but the concept alone manages something most games don’t: it makes you think about what you’re actually doing when you play, and why this particular story can only exist as satire.