SPOILERS BELOW (and I assume some knowledge of the InFamous games)

To get the second set of powers in InFamous: Second Son, you have to catch and defeat a fellow conduit named Fetch. Up to that point, you only know Fetch as a serial-killer of drug dealers. Deslin, the game’s main character, tracks her by investigating two murder scenes.

After defeating her(in one very frustrating and awkward boss fight), Deslin learns her backstory: turned in as a conduit by her own parents at a young age, she was trained by the government to use her powers to kill. After escaping at the beginning of the game, Fetch runs to Seattle with her brother Brent. They quickly become drug addicts. Fetch, going through withdrawal and convinced Brent took some of her stash, kills him in a rage.

Tragic.

From that moment on, Fetch vows to kill every last drug dealer she can find in Seattle. The logic to free herself from the consequences of her actions is mind-bending: it wasn’t her who killed Brent, it was the drugs. And via proxy, the drug dealers.

Deslin’s cop brother, Reggie, is ready to take her in after Deslin defeats her. You know, for the murders. The unlawful killing of another human being. At which point, Deslin says “she was only killing drug dealers.”

Only killing drug dealers. Given, up to this point InFamous has portrayed drug dealers with all the nuance that Wolfenstein portrays Nazis. They are all beefy, scary looking men armed with guns. Beating them up and destroying their drugs brings you good karma in the game.

Now, I’m not going to argue where drugs fall on the moral spectrum, and the drugs portrayed in InFamous are likened more to the heroin/meth side of narcotics than the pot side. However, the outright killing of a heroin dealer isn’t something that can really be placed in a moral-grey area. Adjacent, sure, but not right in the goddamn middle, which is what InFamous does.

At key moments in the story, InFamous gives you moral choices. When it comes to Fetch, you have to decide whether to redeem or corrupt her. I chose redeem, which basically means Deslin teachers her not to kill drug dealers while still destroying the drug trade in Seattle. It would have been much more interesting if the morally “right” choice was to turn her in for, you know, murdering people. Both choices, to me, felt like I was giving her a free pass for killing people in cold blood, which would have been fine for the “evil” choice.

Now, I know it it’s a bit ridiculous to bring this up in a game where I have killed anti-conduit activists by doing a comet drop into the middle of their protest. I guess I just wasn’t expecting the outright condoning of murder in a game that’s supposed to present you with morally ambiguous choices(at least in the narrative).

Oh well. At least for the rest of her imaginary life, Fetch won’t be treating drug dealers like goombas.