Kat, the superheroine of Gravity Rush 2, has plenty of opportunities to save the day (and the world), but she most often spends her time and her powers on the mundane. A typical afternoon is spent delivering newspapers, catching runaway balloons, running errands for the elderly, and, with whatever she has left of her day, dismantling a financial system that favors the few over the many. You know, like any socially conscious young person.
Gravity Rush 2 is, and this isn’t me reaching, 2017’s first (and potentially only) big-budget video game about the income gap, the ethical and personal complexities of salvaging modern capitalist societies, and one jumper-loving young woman. With the help of a cat made of stardust, Kat and her cat pursue, often by force, a historic economic rebalancing.
The game is set in the sky on a collection of villages and cities built onto man-made islands that float on air. Social status is layered like a sour trifle. The most affluent citizens live in spacious estates in clear skies. Miles beneath, in the clouds, wades a collection of marketplaces ensconced by sun-cooked apartment buildings. On the lowest archipelago, tenements and industrialization are stacked atop each other, held together by a purple, mucousy fog.
The politics in ‘Gravity Rush 2’ aren’t subtle
Kat’s power allows her steer the direction of gravity; in a video game about the pyramid of income inequality, you play as the person who can invert what goes up and what comes down. I’d say the game lacks subtlety, but compared to the political blockbusters of Peter Berg, it’s Bulgakov.