I don't understand what the people crying "keep politics out of games" even mean in this context. Detroit is already a game about that is explicitly about politics, covering it without "talking about politics" is like covering Doom without talking about guns or demons. At that point you might as well just talk about its graphics and framerate, which is neither interesting coverage, nor something GB specializes in. If you're going to cover this game, you're going to have to talk about its politics.
But even ignoring all that, the "politics" in question are not just some abstract or ideological political views, but concrete things that affected the developers of this game. One of Giant Bomb's ideals since the very beginning has been the a more people-centric view of the games industry. Jeff literally had to found the site because of problems within the game media industry. The site has never been "only discuss the game, nothing else matters", it was founded to get away from that, to give the people in the industry a face and a voice. While the primary purpose of this was due to the fact that there's a lot of interesting, entertaining personalities in the industry, it also allowed people to empathize with people working in games, when the industry used to be a bunch of faceless corporations with a few director-style figureheads.
It's not like a toxic working environment is an alien topic to the crew, they've always been willing to talk about those things. You can keep those things separate from the quality of the game, but when a game has explicit political messages, it's relevant to know how the head writer of the game feels about those issues. And it's especially relevant if said head writer has been accused of harassment.
It can look cool, for example in Prey. I don't think it really matters if an early credits sequence breaks the fourth wall, you're not likely to be immersed into the world that early on, anyway. They usually appear around the same time as the tutorials, how immersed are you while the game is telling you to press X to pick up objects?
Kinda half-assed this out at the last minute, and there's a couple games I'd like to play more of (AC IV) or play at all (The Swapper), but these are the games that stick out to me at the end of the year.
It's been a while, but they talk about some things being fixed points in time. They describe them as constants and variables, if I remember correctly. So the backstory is probably always the same, even if the details vary.
A lot of disturbing stuff in this episode, Clementine was really put through the wringer in this one. Don't regret getting back at some of the people in this one, they deserved it. Blackmailing Rebecca felt great after all that.
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