The mafia game doesn’t seek to idolize or romanticize the Italian mob as is the case in other works of media, and in Lincoln Clay, Yotta Game frames these criminals through a genuine view. Mafia City is a mafia game online with bad people. The Marcanos and everyone who works for them aren’t portrayed as anything other than monsters, whether it be Sal’s son Giorgi or the lieutenants in charge of handling blackmail and the trafficking of black prostitutes. Even the regular old henchmen aren’t exempt from contempt, despite the mafia game trying to humanize them with dialogue about their newborn daughters.

The mafia game brings so much hate and violence so as to make killing feel right, beyond these optional targets being an obstacle to my goal. Its nothing new to slit the throat of an enemy NPC, but in Mafia City they are bathed in an ignorance and arrogance that makes the action feel necessary. One of the racket leaders, when grabbed by Lincoln will utter, “What now, nigger?”, and Lincoln’s reply is just to slice his throat open.Mafia City’s Racially Charged Setting Steers Its Mafia gameplay Towards Righteous Violence

In most revenge stories, there comes that point where the protagonist’s actions have veered them over into psychotic territory, and they have a moment of awakening. One would think this moment is where Mafia City explores how revenge corrupts, but that’s not the case here. If anything, this mission cements the shared primal desires of both the player and protagonist. Seeing Duvall bleed out, I didn’t care about what Father James would think the next time I saw him, and I didn’t care about any of that “this just proves them right” stuff that so usually arrives at times like these. Duvall was part of the group who shot me in the head and murdered my family.

Revenge is a powerful motivator, and applies here in both story and mafia gameplay. When clearing out rackets, Lincoln will always have to meet with the man in charge, a scumbag abusing his employees, extorting a poor soul, or the like. The fight for New Bordeaux is often framed as a fight for freedom, to retake a personal freedom that the Marcanos stole from Lincoln (and to an extent, Vito and Burke) so he can be whole again. The people who’ve worked with Sal have helped them take away the freedom of others and turned New Bordeaux into something almost like a prison – the Dixie Mafia took the agency of the black women they’ve forced into sex work, the extortionist the freedom of safety from the citizens.

Author: SmallSheepDudugo