It's a 2016 dialog choice and QTE driven game along the same gameplay lines as Telltale games like The Walking Dead. Of the writer-director, wikipedia describes him:

Khonsari was raised in his homeland Iran until 10. He fled Iran as a political refugee to Canada after the 1979 Revolution with his family.

My assumption is that there are two possibilities for this game. It's either just another run-of-the-mill both-sides-bad centrist-brained libfest that paints the revolutionaries as being "well intentioned" but all revolutions (except for bourgeois ones of course) inevitably lead to "authoritarian" dictatorships that are even worse than what existed before and any good-guy revolutionaries presented at the start of the game either turn out bad or are shown to have been naive fools for ever hoping things could be better. That's what the game is painting itself to be, regardless of whatever it is. The other possibility, made more likely given the writer-director's background, is that it's flat out unabashedly pro-imperialist, anti-Iranian unmitigated western propaganda.

I guess those two aren't mutually exclusive, but I think you know what I mean, where they kind of represent two ends of a shitty spectrum. (There's also the exceedingly slim possibility its politics are halfway decent, but I'm not really entertaining that thought because the chances are too close to null.) I'm curious enough about where this game lands on that spectrum that I think I'll go ahead and play it. I'm not one to rage quit in the traditional sense, but if it gets bad enough, I probably won't subject myself to it any further. So before going in, has anybody here already experienced whatever this game is pushing? Any thoughts about it one way or another?

Some quotes from the "Political and institutional responses" section of the Natopedia article on it:

When the game started gaining popularity in June 2012, Iranian conservative newspaper Kayhan published pieces naming it "pro-Western propaganda" and accusing Khonsari of espionage; he subsequently felt afraid to reenter the country. Some developers used aliases to protect themselves, and the concept artist fled Iran due to his involvement. Khonsari said that "anytime Iran has something written about them in the west, they feel as if it is propaganda against them." Following the game's release in 2016, the National Foundation for Computer Games (NFCG) blocked all websites distributing it in Iran and began gathering all illegally distributed copies in the country.

featured in a November 2016 UNESCO report by Paul Darvasi about the impact of games on learning about conflict resolution; Darvasi noted the game "might be studied to determine if [it] can be used to support the production of historical empathy, global empathy, and ethnocultural empathy, all which contribute to the acquisition and development of intercultural understanding".  In 2022, a branch of Germany's Federal Agency for Civic Education critiqued the game; teacher Alexander Zart found it affected by subjective depictions due to Khonsari's significant personal background, despite its framing as an "interactive documentary".

Thanks to ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆ @yogthos@lemmy.ml for this one, I saw posted here. Wasn't expecting to see a comic so perfectly nail it.

Edit: Aaaand now I see that this was basically posted yesterday, but as a link to the xcancel thread about it. So I guess here's the direct link to the comic at least.

Edit: So it looks like there are a couple posts about how this crackdown is fake news. Even in this very thread, someone is doing that, though they actually don't have a clue as to what they're talking about.

No, this is not fake news. These sites that are still up are not fmovies, which was itself part of a large piracy network, the rest of which has been dismantled as well, as has been discussed in other posts here. The sites still up are merely copycat sites riding the success of fmovies and trying to cash in themselves. Not that there is anything necessarily wrong with that, and if you can still watch movies like you did with the real thing, great. But some of them it appears are not the most scrupulous of pirates and have or link to potentially dangerous malware.

Regardless, please don't jump to "fAkE nEwS!" accusations when you don't know what you're talking about. All you're doing is muddying the waters about what really is going on and possibly leading people to think that misleading, potentially dangerous sites are fine. Don't do that.

• archive: https://archive.is/DEvXP
• original: https://www.theguardian.com/film/article/2024/aug/29/fmovies-shut-down

So that's what happened to my beloved free treat-dispensing Fmoviesz. It hasn't worked for a month or so, but now there's no more need to speculate exactly why. There has been a huge wave of "piracy" outfit takedowns recently, which is both sad and worrisome and I wonder why this is all happening so all of a sudden. Why the severe crackdown now? Or is it the sort of situation where a big domino fell and they're all connected? They're really making sure any hint of commons gets enclosed and demonize it in the meantime.

I also wonder about the political motivations of Vietnam to go along with this and make the actual arrests. Is it due just to pressure from the west? Does Vietnam have any stake in copyright laws and this takedown, or the precedent of it, does actually benefit them somehow? What's the deal with all that?

From the article:

The efforts marked “a stunning victory for casts, crews, writers, directors, studios, and the creative community across the globe”, said Charles Rivkin, chairman and CEO of the Hollywood trade group the Motion Picture Association (MPA) and the chairman of Ace, in a statement. Larissa Knapp, the executive vice-president and chief content protection officer for the MPA, said the takedown sent a “powerful deterrent message”.

“We look forward to ongoing joint efforts with Vietnamese authorities, US Homeland Security Investigations and the US Department of Justice International Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property (Ichip) program to bring the criminal operators to justice,” she added.