It goes by quick: the story of an imperfect yet happy family turned into a placid examination of an estranged and resentful relationship that forms between mother and daughter after the passing of their husband and father. The daughter – Adora – is tasked by her aunt to find an old key in her childhood home. During her search, she uncovers old memories by cleaning and restoring certain small objects in the house – like a record player and a typewriter – that each house their own unique anecdote.  

She catches glimpses of her mother’s old accolades as a writer, a pursuit she seemingly dropped out of nowhere despite some modest success. After her father’s death, Adora takes up making music, a hobby that reminds her of her father, and makes for her mother a cassette tape with music that reflects her desire to connect and comfort her. But her mother, predictably overworked in her drive to repress her own feelings of grief, throws it in the trash and admonishes Adora for being so reckless with her future, in wasting her time with a pointless hobby. Understandably, their relationship worsens, and when Adora goes off to her adult life, she refuses to call her until she’s proven her wrong. Her mother dies before they ever reconcile with each other, and her regret is obviously sour.  

I love to engage in anticipatory regret. One of my more pressing regrets is that when my parents eventually pass on, it’ll be a righteously unsatisfactory ending to a deeply dysfunctional familial situation. There’s no reconciling, because the situation only persists thanks to my casual lifelong performance as anyone except the kinds of people they deeply fear (gay, leftist, etc) and they allow themselves the peace of sweet ignorance. It’s alienating and weird. I think of it as a thin veil – we are opposed in virtually every way that matters, but they are all I have, so I know at some point I’m going to be like Adora, wishing for different circumstances, a better end to a path that only goes in one direction.

My own memory is pretty spotty, specifically in terms of my own childhood and periods of my life that occurred farther than ten years in the past. Letting a memory attach to something physical is a pretty powerful tool to keep an internal narrative going, especially as a person who never took up writing in a diary. I’ve been dragging around things for over a decade now, from apartment to apartment, simply because it holds the potential to help me remember something I at some point wanted to remember. Occasionally, during the few times per year I wander around the house I grew up in, I’ll pick up some old toy or stuffed animal given to me in a brief moment of harmony in an otherwise turbulent childhood and feel the fog of war lift from some part of my mind. Cleaning off the objects in Undusted feels similarly peaceful, brushing out the crud in the corners and wiping off grime; and finding little pockets of dirt in old gadgets opens the moment of reminiscence to breathe and reach its natural conclusion. 

The end of Adora’s story is the realization that she and her mother were suffering similarly but separately, needlessly for the fact that they could have met each other on equal grounds if they took the time and space to acknowledge their grief. Both had unspoken needs and tragedies through which they filtered their interactions with each other, which led to redundant animosity and miscommunication. Every time they had a moment to reconcile, they stalled.  

It’s a very personal story, and the depth and detail remind me yet again how a certain experience can be elevated by the player rather than the reader or watcher. Cleaning, thinking, coming to terms with each step of the story. Taking the time in its fullness, along for the ride with the author. Part of my bitterness is seeing a familial relationship that could be mended so easily in comparison to my own, but Adora’s story is familiar in its inevitability – there is no ending reflective of an entire life, all the rights and wrongs, things said and unsaid, perfectly preserved in a final moment of satisfaction. Mend what you can, brace for what you can’t.    

I won’t sit here and insist that every relationship is able to be mended—some are destined to be weird and fraught until the very end— but that regret may still remain. Someday I’ll be in a similar position to Adora: sifting through stuff in the garage, boxes of unorganized ephemera (and probably like a hundred bibles), cleaning off the dust and picking apart both the good and the bad memories, waffling between contrition and acceptance. 

The post Facing a Bitter Mirror in Undusted: Letters from the Past appeared first on Gamesline.

WEBFISHING 

Webfishing rules because it’s in a little box off on my other monitor and I can tab out of it without losing the sound, able to pop in and out when I catch a fish and to cast the line again. And the casual social aspect of it is nice – crowding around on a pier, chatting and showing off some monstrous fish that consumes the entire screen for a moment. For at least a few days every month I have several hours of photo editing to knock out, and Webfishing really helped maintain that momentum by giving my attention somewhere else to go other than doomscrolling tumblr or whatever. Just a little brain hack for you. 

Techno Banter 

I already wrote about it in a longer piece but Techno Banter is a standout for me. Stylish, chaotic, and funny, with a bright and dreamy visual design. It reminded me of the feeling when your neighborhood becomes your whole world and your world becomes full of people, the thoughts and feelings of whom you can’t even begin to predict. And you might say, well isn’t that everybody? but go ahead and tell me you can’t make a decent estimation on the feelings of some guy on a golf course.   

Old Skies 

Old Skies is a charming point-and-click from Wadjet Eye about time travel and love. It’s much more character-driven than focused on one big story (though it does tie a lot of the smaller stories together by the end) but these characters are dynamic and emotional. Both the time travel and 9/11 (or rather, 9/10) bits are hard to do well and land right where you want them to, but Old Skies has done it. And, as someone who has been to NYC whopping three whole times, I feel Dave Gilbert’s enduring city spirit all throughout this game. 

Immortal John Triptych

Although the fart/cock/ass jokes started to grate beyond my own personal taste occasionally, Four Last Things, The Procession to Calvary, and Death of the Reprobate were at least some of the most unique little gaming experiences I had last year. They are all very funny at times, quite weird at others. I would consider Joe Richardson like a generational iconoclast, a competent wielder of medieval and religious absurdity. The visuals are entirely made up of Renaissance paintings, which is completely fucking bonkers to me, just considering the time and attention that must take, and it turned out gorgeous. No wonder he wanted to die by the end of it. 

No Players Online 

I have a whole damn interview about it if you’re interested. Basically, I checked it out after hearing about the DMCA takedown issue, and got sucked in whole-heartedly. While it’s labeled as horror, I would describe it more as creepy and atmospheric, and I do appreciate the lack of jump scares, though at times I expected them. The narrative is deeper than it appears on the box, a lingering and lonely story about grief and preoccupation, haunted virtual spaces, with a lot of stylish visuals and a flair for nostalgic desktops. 

Until Then

Yet another Filipino banger. It reminds me of A Space for the Unbound in that way, the representation I can’t personally testify to, but I can see its natural and easy incorporation into the setting even in its most mundane details. Until Then is about repetition of grief and ultimately letting go, and the almost (here, used literally) metaphysical strength it can take to do that. There’s a way that Until Then blends the facets of catastrophe and abuse with guilt and the kind of love that would make you jump into a black hole. I also love stories that put teenagers into these roles – sometimes they’re the ones who understand love in its most chaotic and unconditional forms, for better or worse. 

Artis Impact 

God damn I wish this was longer. It’s interesting and weird, and compact in a way that reminds me of a GBA game or whatever. I love the visuals, the writing is cute and funny, the gameplay is… enough! I don’t love how rushed and aborted the ending is, or that one guy whose whole journey is being a huge misogynist, though it kind of rules that he isn’t teased with some sort of redemption and you just beat his ass instead. Also, I locked myself out of one of the main areas by not being defiant enough at the end of a scripted fight, and I’m not replaying it just for that. But that’s on me, I guess. It’s a very casual RPG, has one-note combat that’s easy to overlevel, with some sim elements that may or may not drive you crazy. I kind of liked that part though. Again, I wish Artis Impact was longer and the narrative (and world, and lore, and characters) fleshed out more, but I enjoyed it a lot and it stands out to me amongst all the other games I played this year. 

SpreadCheat 

Think spreadsheet math puzzles with 90s corporate absurdism. It’s so short I don’t know what else to say about it, but it’s good and I liked it very much. 

Kingdom Come: Deliverance (I & II) 

I’m cheating a bit because it’s hard to choose between this and the other top game – this is my favorite game that I played and was released in 2025. 

I played both of these in 2025 (technically, I’m about 80% of the way done with II, I’m taking a break to read a specific history book, and because often the best kind of satisfaction is the kind that is not immediately delivered) and after almost 200 hours my thoughts sans indulgence are pretty neatly packed. Its combat is such that once you do the things that make sense (train and get real armor) it gets way more intuitive. For a combat system that has been described frequently as “quite challenging” especially for the first game, I was surprised at myself for how well I picked it up and beat ass. It felt steady, and one-on-one fights held their weight. It’s cool. Admittedly, I have a thing for knights.   

As for the indulgence, I just really love the story. It hit me in places I thought I had covered up, especially as the child of very Christian parents, and who is queer in a couple different directions. More on that, eventually. To be honest, I only paid attention to KCD upon hearing the protagonist could have a gay romance in the second game, which was surprising considering the studio and genre. I went into the first game expecting a generic medieval bro atmosphere, and there was some of that, but it lays the foundation of a story about cycles of revenge born from love and loyalty, which isn’t exactly a new story, but it’s well done. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II only amplifies it with really interesting political intrigue and a lot of compassionate interpersonal dynamics. It’s kind and sympathetic as much as it’s bawdy and violent.

The thing about nonstandardized historical concepts like chivalry is it allows you to dream big about how the world used to be. Not in a bad way – I think looking back fondly on what people would have been like and how they moved about their lives is one of the worthwhile parts of studying history in any capacity. I’m sure I have distant ancestors back there somewhere who would be absolutely thrilled at the selection of fruits I have available to me throughout the year, or medicine, or an indoor toilet. Moving throughout the world in KCD2 is deeply immersive. I liked to ride all over the map rather than use fast travel, see the towns and find knights-errant and roving bands of mercenaries and little pockets of people doing their things medieval style. Playing these games felt like genuine escapism, which I needed a lot of this year. That world and the small, beautiful narrative moments about unconventional families and the heavy burden of honor and the ecstasy of revenge all helped to keep my head from blowing up, for sure. 

1000xRESIST

I cannot deny, this is my favorite game that I played in 2025. 

I started 1000xResist up at a LAN party in Seattle over the summer while I waited for the others to finish up a game of something else and it hooked me instantly. It’s intimate and existential. It’s cosmic and isolating. It’s like biting into something I haven’t eaten since I was a kid and walking around my old neighborhood. It’s about family and inheritance, and loneliness, and sorrow, and protest, and love, and justice, and the end of the world. Every time I put it down, I would think about it until I picked it up again. Looking back at my playtime, I’m shocked it packed so much into a game that’s only about 15 hours long, if that.   

1000xRESIST asks questions that don’t have answers, only steps toward and away from some deep intrinsic concept. It actually does the thing I think science fiction itself is best at: exploring the human condition up against otherworldly conditions, against the unfamiliar and unthinkable yet within the orbit of what is, to us, home. So close yet so far away. It goes a step further by exploring the human condition within a vessel within a closed system of one woman’s accumulated and inherited grief. Its surrealism reminds me of many other works that I call fundamental to myself as a person whose interests shape them, and perhaps that’s also why it works so well. Weaving together these chaotic sentiments that flow through and around the sprawling reality of diaspora to the isolated horror of a family torn apart by disaster is no small and graceful feat. The disjointed, unnerving, and abstract forms in which this story is told is so integral to the whole experience that I have internalized it as a prime example of how you can use the medium of video game to make a point in a specific way that couldn’t be made otherwise.

1000xRESIST is so obviously written from the personal perspectives of the authors, but it touches upon so many wounds inherent to any player, really. I cried and sat in silence by the end, feeling that catharsis and the comfort of the story of a kind of kindred spirit. It let a little steam out, brought me back down to Earth where we’re not so different, you and I. It’s a special piece of art I hope remains in conversations about extraordinary writing for many, many years to come. 

The post Franny’s 2025 Game of the Year – The Top Games I Played So My Head Didn’t Blow Up appeared first on Gamesline.

Parker: Entropy is our most recent announced title by the developer of Dread Delusion, Lovely Hellplace. 

Entropy is a tactical turn-based RPG inspired by classic PS1 Final Fantasy and Vagrant Story. It’s a dark fantasy similar to Dread Delusion, where the world is abandoned by its gods – which are cosmic beings that are unclear if they’re good or evil – in a post- post- post- post- post-apocalyptic world. The land is beginning to turn sour, people are beginning to get sick, settlements are all dying out, and there are demons running rampant around the land. 

You start as a member of a theater troupe, one of the players, and during a demon attack all of your troupe is destroyed, the town is destroyed, and you’re sort of thrust into this situation where in order to survive you have to band together with any survivors and mercenaries to figure out how to re-establish contact with the gods who abandoned you. 

Franny: I like that there’s still theater in a post- post- post-apocalyptic world. No matter what we’re always going to find a way to get on stage and embarrass ourselves a little bit.  

Parker: Absolutely, and you know, I think if we were, in real life, living a post- post- post-apocalyptic world where we didn’t have the comforts and technologies to rely on right now, and like generations from now not knowing what any of this did, it would kind of seem like magic to them. So, I would say if anything, we would probably regress as a society back to medieval times or something like that, back to feudalism. 

Franny: It reminds me a little of 17776 by Jon Bois. It’s about what football looks like after humanity has become immortal, so the world hasn’t exactly ended but it’s changed fundamentally, and people are going to still play football, just crazier. Why not go to space? Why not go a hundred miles per hour? Or whatever. 

Parker: Okay, space football sounds cool, but I do want to ask: is it American football or other football? 

Franny: Good ol-fashioned. 

Parker: Throwing stuff at people. 

Franny: Absolutely. 

Okay, back to Entropy, and actually, a question for you: What does your role look like in relation to Entropy? 

Parker: Yeah! So, on the publishing side with DreadXP I’m the project manager. We’re a pretty small team, we just expanded to around nine people, but we have multiple projects ongoing. The core production team is four of us, so I’m one of those four. Henry, our head of operations and production leads the four of us to make sure that everything is going smoothly on the games, that we’re providing the developers with the resources that they need to continue working. 

We provide feedback on the builds and we all have prior development experience as well. So, we all like to think and practically know what goes into making these games, and can provide that experience a little bit as insight for new developers, or for smaller teams that are kind of wanting to fill the gaps. 

Franny: The catalog of games that DreadXP publishes seems really specifically curated. At least personally, I look at the games you have here and they seem like exactly my type, there’s a real aesthetic consistency. 

Parker: That’s what I like to hear! And Hunter Bond, our studio director, and Henry Hoare, our head of operations and production, have recently really expanded the catalog of DreadXP games to incorporate multiple different genres. 

When the company got started a few years ago with the Dread X Collection, that was kind of a way to have little bite-sized tastes of all different kinds of games. Instead of just doing, you know, traditional outright horror, we’ve expanded to like Resident Evil/Silent Hill homages, some that are comedic, some that are their own takes on things, to First-Person Shooters. And now to tactical combat sandboxes and turn-based RPGs and roguelikes like White Knuckle, PIGFACE, The Secret of Weepstone, and Entropy, which we just announced, and The Lacerator. It’s really fun to be able to see people of all different tastes get to try things in our catalog. 

Franny: About Entropy, can you speak to some of the inspirations behind it? 

Parker: I would say personally, and after talking with James of Lovely Hellplace, even just looking at the key art, classic RPGs and JRPGs, especially from the 90s and the early 2000s are the main inspirations for gameplay. But the development team that James is working with all have really in-depth knowledge of their world’s lore, similar to Dread Delusion, where the narrative is so focused. 

Franny: It does seem dense, richly written. 

Parker: Very dense, and they’re excited to unveil like all of the cosmology that’s going on around this, and I think James has a taste for that kind of large-scale incorporation with small-scale personal issues, to show how the two are correlated. 

Franny: I played a bit of Dread Delusion, and it kind of had that way of not necessarily holding your hand through the world. It was just like, this is the world, here are the people in it who’ll tell you what they know, and you kind of have to piece it together yourself. 

Parker: Dread Delusion being so inspired by Morrowind was the same deal. Where like, here’s the world, here are the directions you can go with this beautiful establishing shot, have fun! You’re prompted with some main quest stuff, but you can just go do whatever. Entropy is actually very different from Dread Delusion in that sense. 

It’s channeling the stories from traditional JRPGs from the 90s, it has a more concrete story that it wants to tell and to unfold in a certain order, while also having side quests and rich characters that you can engage with. One of my favorite mechanics that are shown in the demo – which will be available to the public later – is these little choose-your-own-adventure vignettes. So, in the overworld map, there are locations you can visit. Some of them, you walk up to- and it kind of reminds me of Zork in a way, where it’s text that unfolds with these beautiful images and sprite work, and you’re like walking through this trail and suddenly teeth are raining from the sky, like what do you do? I think that’s a creative way to allow the player to engage in bite-sized side content to flesh out the lore and the atmosphere and the rules of the world. 

That’s something that I really appreciate about it. It has a lot of different flavors for people. 

Franny: I think I did run into one of those where it was like a guy in a tent, and he asks me for help killing some big monster, and I’m thinking I don’t know if I’m ready for that yet, and he just leaves mad. 

Parker: He’s like “fuck you, alright, I’ll go do it.” 

Franny: “Well, I didn’t need you anyway!” 

Parker: And seeing the consequences of that later as something that’s gonna be shown off in the full game. The demo here only covers part of the intro area, so there’s a lot more to discover. 

Franny: What did Lovely Hellplace take from Dread Delusion over to Entropy, if anything? Or are they jumping into a whole new thing? 

Parker: Yeah, after talking with James about what he enjoyed from Dread Delusion, what James really does well is tell engaging, lore-rich stories that unfold to whatever degree the player wants to learn from it. And mechanically, James really wants to create a combat system that’s engaging, and a progression system and a quest system that not only harken back but also iterate on the inspirations it’s taken from. 

Dread Delusion being so narratively focused and so exploration focused, now he wants to kind of hone in all of the skills that he took from that, and say, here are all the story bits that I want to tell, and here’s a more in-depth combat system, and here’s a more streamlined way to experience the story, while also providing more player agency. 

Franny: Has anything changed about the visual design between the 2 games? They look very similar. 

Parker: Yeah, that PS1 low-poly aesthetic. I would say the lighting and the texture work, at least from working with James on Dread Delusion and Entropy both, those are things that I’ve taken away from their visual style. And Dread Delusion was so large-scale, but a benefit of doing something like a JRPG is that with an overworld and specific explorable locations, that also lets them play with level design and to actually curate things. So, not only are areas more dense because it’s not trying to render an entire big world at all times, it’s more pretty to look at and they can play with the lighting a little bit more. 

Franny: In the demo, I noticed all the finer details seemed tighter and sharper without losing any of that chunky PS1 aesthetic, or the colors, or whatever. Like, I can read everything a little better, make out details on a face a little better.

Parker: I think that James, both in Dread Delusion and in Entropy, harkens back to the PS1 in terms of how many textures and polys that it does, but one of the things that you can leverage now with current day technology is you can just make it more dense. In a lot of old games, they couldn’t render as many objects on screen at once. Like, I love Final Fantasy 9, and I’m thinking back to the original version where it’s just some grass texture or whatever. 

Franny: It’s the same grass stamp over and over again into a horizon, the rest of imagination. 

Parker: Whereas now, it’s like let’s build an interesting backdrop. Let’s fill it with mushrooms that are explained in the lore as like, how did the soil let these mushrooms grow? It looks more lush. 

Franny: One of my favorite things that I’ve seen so far from Entropy, and especially from Dread Delusion, is the narrative. How expansive it is, but also how developed it is. Can you speak to the team’s process in developing that narrative at all? 

Parker: From working with James earlier in the process for Entropy, the narrative informs the design a lot of the time. So, they have these key world building narrative events laid out and outlined already, and they want to curate the heavy-hitting gameplay moments around those. 

Franny: Is there anything else you wanted to say about Entropy or DreadXP, or just some final thoughts? 

Parker: You know, I really love working at DreadXP. I feel like getting to work so closely with the developers gives me inspiration to continue to work on my own stuff too. I learn a lot from them and I hope that I can impart and help contribute just in some small way to the games being successful and them, you know, hopefully still having really good mental health and work-life balance with scope and everything. 

Franny: That’s the important thing. Some of these bigger games sometimes kind of sacrifice the people making them in ways. 

Parker: One thing I love is like, we’re just normal people. We all want to help each other. I think that I’ve grown a lot since working here, with my skill set, with the breadth of games and development experience of the teams that we’re working with. 

I have been given a lot of perspective, and I know that it’s a common thing to say “I’m so grateful to work at this job, this job is my life.” It’s important to me and so is my team, but they also really value lives outside of that. To be like games isn’t all there is, and we can take inspiration to make games from elsewhere, and I really appreciate the team for reminding me of that and offering that perspective. 

I think for Entropy, James’ love of classic fantasy and world building lore-rich things help him flesh out the game mechanics and the visuals, and I’m really excited to see it all come together.  

The post Conversation with Parker Hamilton of DreadXP appeared first on Gamesline.

On November 13th, just one week after release, No Players Online was delisted from Steam until December 3rd, when it was reinstated and a statement was released by studio Beeswax Games, clarifying that its takedown was due to a DMCA claim made by a former friend. It’s hard to overstate how much of an effect something like this can have on a small company. Obviously financially, but also in terms of reputation, momentum, and loss of goodwill from any lack of transparency. It’s a weird situation, something that doesn’t happen often, so I sat down with Adam Pype of Beeswax Games to talk about both the incident with Steam and No Players Online itself, a conversation I was excited to have, especially after buying and playing No Players Online myself. 

No Players Online doesn’t give away too much on its face. Its description is simple: “you find an abandoned fps game on an old computer. you decide to play it.” And play you certainly do, but beyond the empty, eerie capture-the-flag style map that the player uses to traverse some of the game’s larger themes and threads, there’s a stylish desktop with secrets to uncover. Little mini games that have souls of their own, digital occultism that runs through everything, and a lot of little touches here and there that relay an attention to detail and personal experience. No Players Online is comfortable in and unironic about its own genre. Some of the humor is nostalgic, the horror creeping and suffocating, complementing the sometimes morbid nature of obsessive grief. Everything gets space to breathe and build, resulting in an experience that I had a lot of thoughts about.

Adam: I’m one-third of Beeswax Games, it’s me and Tibau Van Den Broeck who’s a generalist – I’m also a generalist – so we both do a bit of the art, a bit of the code. We work together with Viktor Kraus who does all the audio, so it’s a small little game studio, I suppose. 

We made a game called No Players Online that was released recently, but before that, we made a game called SPOOKWARE which was kind of like WarioWare meets Paper Mario but spooky. So, both No Players Online and SPOOKWARE are based on games that I made on my own before we started the company. I was doing game-a-month at the time, in which I make a game every month and kept that up for 32 months- 

Franny: Oh wow! That’s impressive. 

Adam: Thank you! So, we got a lot of different concepts from that and then SPOOKWARE was the first thing that we were approached for to expand that into a bigger thing, so we did that, and then after we did that, we took No Players Online which was a small game jam thing that I did with Viktor back in 2019. We decided that because it was always kind of the most popular thing that we put out that we should really make it bigger, and so we spent two and a half years expanding it, kind of rebuilding it from scratch, like a spiritual successor, same title but bigger game, much bigger game. The original was about ten minutes long, and the new release is about three hours long.    

Franny: And I know you already made a couple statements about it, but if you’d like to reiterate what happened with it being pulled off of Steam? 

Adam: It really sucks because this was a former friend, so it was someone who I really trusted who basically went kind of rogue and he filed a DMCA claim to Steam like a week after we released the game, and Steam is kind of required to take it down a game when a DMCA is filed, even when it’s not real or in the right. And then we file a counter-claim and then it needs to be down for like ten more business days or something like that, so in effect the game was down for like three weeks just after release. Which, of course, is not great. 

Franny: I briefly tried to read up on like, US and UK copyright laws and it seems like copyright laws in the US are more reactive and standardized where a single claim can be very effective, especially when the allegedly infringed product is virtual and access to it can be easily revoked, whereas it seems a little more localised in the UK and I think that would give someone more of a grace period to allow for like a quicker and clearer resolution. In this case, having No Players Online pulled from the platform over an unsubstantiated claim, puts your team into a kind of guilty until proven innocent situation. So, what were the immediate consequences of this from the perspective of you and your team and how have you been recovering? 

Adam: Definitely it came to a big shock. It didn’t come completely out of nowhere, like there were some warning signs before it happened, already having complications with this person, but we really didn’t think they would go that far. But they did, and then we were kind of just shocked that it happened. I was personally very emotionally hit by it because I really used to trust this person.

But then I called my publisher like “what’s the next step” and there’s nothing you can do, the only thing was we got the lawyer and filed a counter-claim, we did all the steps correctly right away, but the reality is still the game is down for three weeks just a week after release. With Steam it’s so important that you keep that momentum of launch, because during the launch is when you make the most sales, normally, so it’s super critical. I mean obviously the loss was inevitable, but we were mostly worried about what the long term was going to look like for this game. Like, if all the momentum is killed, with the way the Steam algorithm works, it’ll get pushed down way more, effectively it’s like your game gets no downloads for like three weeks. And, you know, our game was in New & Trending before it got taken down, so obviously it’s not there now that it’s gone back up. 

A lot of visibility is just taken away. So, the only thing we could do was make a statement because not only did people not know why it was taken down, people thought it was part of the ARG – which would have been kind of crazy, no matter how much it could do for the ARG it would not make up for the loss in revenue. People even thought “oh maybe they got a DMCA from Microsoft because they used Minesweeper.” (laughs) There were a lot of theories going about, but we were obviously going to be careful, because also just legally we wanted to make all of the right moves and stuff. Not that we were, in any case, in the wrong or anything, like you said, basically treated as if we were guilty. And we obviously also have to say publicly that we didn’t steal anything, all of it is our own work. Some people even thought it was like “oh, did they use a ton of AI” or something. (laughs)

Franny: And those are things that you want to set the record straight on right away. 

Adam: Yeah, exactly, but the thing is we couldn’t even set the record straight right away because if we did that right away, then all of the publicity from that statement would have gone to nothing because the game is still not available. So, we waited until the game got back up, so that at least, you know, people could sympathize with the situation and then hopefully convert that back into sales a little bit, so that it can recover, which is what we eventually did. 

It was a really annoying three weeks. The only thing we could do was in the background prepare a statement, and then just wait and in the meantime look at the fact that the game was not available. It was so annoying because even like I think Pyrocynical was about to stream the game, looked it up on Steam and it wasn’t there, so he didn’t play it. So many potential people who could have played it. I would be like at events or something and people would ask me “what’s your game” and it’s like “oh yeah, it’s called No Players Online but it’s not up right now.” (laughs)

At least, itch kept the game up even though they also got a DMCA claim, but I think, this is just my guess, I think it’s because the people at itch know me a little better. 

Franny: And you’re not like an unknown person, you had the first iteration of No Players Online featured on let’s plays from big creators, articles written about it, there was momentum. And now Steam removed your access to a global market around a really critical time. What was the communication like between the studio and Valve during this process? 

Adam: The game gets taken down, the whole DMCA thing goes through the legal department in Valve, so it’s not the same department that does store management and stuff, so they were just like, “this is the DMCA you got, you have these next steps” very generally, but after the game got back up, we didn’t actually message Steam. Our thinking as well was: it’s also not good for Steam that like this game – that was doing well – gets such a big hit. So, we asked if we could get another round of visibility, or maybe like a daily deal or something, but they couldn’t do a daily deal so soon after release so “ask again later.” 

It’s just weird, I don’t understand why Steam wouldn’t want to help the game, like it’s obviously a very unique situation, but also I obviously understand why they took the game down, I completely understand why they want to do the right move and go through that legal process, but it’s definitely kind of baffling to us. At least, the statement and stuff, the community and people reacting to it and we had a lot of people help out and press reach out. It really, really helped a lot. 

The game has somewhat recovered in sales, it hasn’t recovered like the period it lost, but it seems to have gotten some of its momentum back. So, we’re feeling at least a little bit more optimistic for the future, like the long tail of the game. But still, the damage is there, and I don’t know how things work behind the scenes with Steam, I don’t know how it looks in the algorithm, and it’s annoying that it’s all so opaque. 

Franny: I would imagine it would be nice to have more transparency. Personal details aside, but in terms of what occurs with the person who made the false DMCA claim, what kind of consequence they face when they don’t share the same stake in Steam as you. 

Adam: When you file a DMCA, it does say “if you do this and it’s not true, you are committing perjury and you will be liable for damages.” Obviously if you do a DMCA, it’s very serious. The law should ultimately be on our side. And we’ve already spent a ton of money just on legal costs and stuff, just getting the game reinstated. It’s just a really annoying situation. 

Also, what was kind of morbidly funny was that after the game got reinstated we had a bunch of bundles like with Inscryption and Hypnospace Outlaw, all of those bundles were gone when the game got reinstated, so we tried to get them back up but when we tried, it would just give an error message and we contacted Steam support and Steam found a new bug. I guess it never happened before that a game would get DMCA’d with a bunch of bundles and then get reinstated. 

Franny: What’s been a bright spot for you and your team? 

Adam: Definitely the reaction of people, how many people reached out that were showing their support and stuff, I think a lot of people wanted us to succeed, especially in the Belgium games industry, because it is such a small industry, so everyone is always really supportive of each other. I mean, I think everyone found the whole situation quite baffling, and I was happy that we could make that statement and finally kind of talk about it publicly so that people were aware. I was really happy how many people just helped out, and at least it does seem like maybe long-term the game will be okay. But it shows, you know, that a lot of people care about the game and care about us doing well. It would just have been nice if Steam cared a bit more. 

Franny: I gotta wonder if there’s going to be any sort of internal dialogue within Valve about their reaction to this, especially because it’s a games platform, I would imagine they’d want to support the games that are on it in the ways they can. 

Adam: And normally they are very supportive. I guess their hand was just a bit forced in this situation, and it’s such a unique situation that doesn’t happen a lot. I don’t know who in Steam has the authority to make an exception, it’s such a big company as well. I think also, the nice thing about itch not taking the game down, at least the game was still available somewhere while it was down, and I think what’s so nice about a site like itch is that it’s much smaller and they can kind of just call the shot be like, “okay, we kind of trust this developer, we’ll keep the game up.” I think it’s great that even itch kind of took that risk as well, you know, for us, which is just like crazy. (laughs) I mean, I love itch, it has obviously made my career I think, and dealing with Steam as such a big corporate thing is just different, I guess. It needs to draw the right kind of attention before they do something. 

Franny: They’re definitely different ecosystems. 

Adam: It should be noted that Steam is just so, so much more important than itch, like when our game was released on Steam, the amount of units that sold on the first day was quite a lot, but on itch it was barely a hundred. As much as I love itch, unfortunately Steam is still the monopoly. It’s just incomparable, there’s not a real alternative, it’s just not the same volume.

Franny: We saw your statement going around, so I bought No Players Online and played it and I really, really enjoyed it. I really liked how it utilized that nostalgic feeling of early operating systems. I feel like we’re seeing more and more of these digital forensic/desktop exploration type games and it’s always stunning to see how different developers interpret their own vision, almost always inspired by personal memories. 

You even capture a few specific things that stood out to me like the pirated visual novel with the personalized gotcha moment of your love interest calling you a thief undeserving of love. That one popped me, and the accompanying key gen, I had one that I used when I was a kid that was all swirly and blue and it had this ethereal, oceanic music that played every time you opened it. I’ve spent this whole time thinking that was so unique, so we either encountered the same type of key gen or that was its own aesthetic back then and I didn’t really notice. 

Adam: I definitely did my fair share of piracy as a kid for sure, and I feel this is 100% a trope of the key gen with the Sega-ass-chiptune music that’s always such a banger and super loud for no reason.

Franny: This obviously just isn’t a desktop exploration kind of game, there’s a lot more to it, but are you pulling from a lot of your own personal experience and memories, with the design and feeling of it?  

Adam: Definitely, I mean in terms of the desktop itself, I try to go for something that feels somewhere between Windows 95 and XP, and I specifically wanted to do that because I feel like a lot of the retro desktop games go more for 95, but I’m too young to have really used Windows 95, so most of my memories are like XP. For me, it was like even though we set the game in the 90s, I wanted it to have an XP flavor because that was what I knew as a kid. 

Franny: I can see it in the soft edges and the shading, the kind of metallic sheen on everything.

Adam: Exactly, it’s much more bubbly, I suppose. I’m really happy with how it turned out, it’s actually funny because when we started working on the game, well usually when we make games we don’t do that much planning beforehand, we kind of just take it more organically, and in my mind it was like: okay, the desktop is going to be like a little bit of work and then most of it is gonna be the game. But, the desktop ended up taking most of the work because apparently it’s really hard to make a desktop interface. 

It’s just a lot of really tiny things that you don’t think about, and we also really wanted it to be fully featured, like you can drag files around and make files. We really wanted it to feel like an actual desktop and have that feeling of- I don’t know, Windows XP used to be really so cozy, like your little desktop where you can make your little files. Maybe that’s just nostalgia, but that’s definitely something that I wanted to do and by making things a bit more squishy, we wanted it to be a little cute even though it’s still a horror game. But then, at a certain point we did have to cut some corners, we made it so that you can’t move folders around, because it would have made it too difficult. 

Especially because the desktop is not just there as a window dressing, like a fancy menu for the games, but it’s very much a live feature. A lot of people don’t know this, so I don’t even know why we added this because it’s kind of unnecessary, but the older games that you download in the game, all of their folders are live, so if you move the graphic assets or music around different folders of different games, the games update and have those assets, it all works. It’s a very unnecessary feature, but we do use some of it for especially the ARG stuff without spoiling so much. The point was very much: we’ll make a desktop that is actually real and then we’ll try and actually do things with it, and I’m pretty sure we kind of ended up doing that. Pretty happy. 

Franny: I would say also what stood out to me was the visuals are so striking – the low poly but with the vibrant colors and dramatic shadows. It reminds me a lot of Buckshot Roulette and other games like that, at least visually. Was there any kind of specific inspiration or aesthetic discipline that you tapped into for No Players Online? 

Adam: The biggest inspiration for No Players Online was the original one. (laughs)

Franny: Oh, absolutely. 

Adam: If you play the original one, we created a new map, it’s very similar but not quite. It was actually fun to kind of remake my own game because I didn’t research my own game, like when I started working on it, it was already many years since I made No Players Online from 2019. I kind of remade it just from memory, so like I remade the map just from how I remember it, you know? And I made the gun and all the visuals, so it’s like I wanted to basically do an updated nostalgic remake or something of my own game. 

But then also, for example like you said with those striking shadows, that was very deliberate because usually when people do this kind of VFX stuff, you get a shader from the internet or something, and then use it outright, but we kind of adapted shaders that were made by Modus Interactive, which is a really good programmer for this kind of PSX stuff. We adapted it to put in a lot of the normal Unity new material stuff. So, you would have real shadows but still have a lot of the PSX elements but just kind of pick and choose the ones that give it the texture without it actually being limiting, so it has a lot of new rendering features of a modern game. Personally, I really like doing lighting in games, that’s one of my maybe specialties. 

Franny: I know there have been a few reviews claiming it’s not scary enough, however, I honestly think you – especially with the visuals alongside the other elements – conveyed the sense of horror you were going for very well. Computers, especially in their early days, have always kind of been more of a math made manifest, so you’re expecting a predictable series of events when you use a computer, so there’s usually this unsettling quality to moments where things act up or you get a virus and in No Players Online that dread combined with the later on explicit occultism really makes those unsettling moments more affecting. Especially as you build up the context between the player and John and Sarah, it really does present this horrifying atmosphere that’s not immediately in your face but kind of slowly consuming the world around you. 

Adam: Well, thank you! I think, it’s interesting that you say that because one of the first sounds that we ever added to the game was the drone on the guest desktop, as as soon as we added that to what was at that point just a normal desktop, immediately it made it feel so fucking ominous. And that was very much a direction we wanted to go in for the horror of it. A lot of the time there’s really nothing explicitly scary on the screen but it’s just the atmosphere of it is scary even though there’s nothing going on.  

So, the original No Players Online in 2019, I made that game very specifically because I wanted to make something scary, that was like the only goal I had with that game. But for the new game, I wanted it to be about something actually. For me, I still wanted it to be scary, but I wanted to use more of a horror setting and have the scary be in what it means and the context of it, but not necessarily something that’s really classically horrifying. It would have been easy to take the original concept and you’re alone in a multiplayer game and we’ll extend that experience for a couple of hours and then there’s a monster or something with some scares.

I think calling it explicitly a horror game is more so the problem in terms of the audience. A lot of people, when they see horror game they really expect it to be a horror horror game, but it’s more like horror as a setting, in the way that The Shining is a horror film as opposed to Saw. For our development, the beginning of it was very directly re-done from the original, so it’s the same setup with the shooter prototype and whole first sequence, but then we wanted to take this very quick story that we made in the original game of this woman who dies and is stuck in the game by the developer. But we wanted to take what is a tropey dead-wife-stuck-in-the-game story and turn it on its head a little bit and give the wife more agency, making it more about her and her getting out of the game, rather than about the developer and John and his loss. I think that was the intention further into the game when it becomes more of like a love story and that story about grief and more about her escaping what is ultimately kind of abuse in a way. The game eventually becomes more of a drama near the end, and personally I like that it goes that way, like it’s not going where you think it’s going, it’s a lot of surprises.

I think a lot of people just want to get what they expect. They’re like “oh I’m alone in the horror multiplayer game, more of that please” and then they’re happy, but you can’t please everyone, I suppose. 

Franny: Everyone has their own metric for fear. I went through the CTF portion of No Players Online for the first time and this unknown player joins the game and it’s a shadowy figure in the distance, and I pause the game and go wash my dishes to recenter myself. That stuff scares me.  

Adam: (laughs) That’s excellent. 

I think a lot about the fact that you do put something of yourself in a game, always.

Franny: And you can do that so well with virtual spaces, especially when you grow up with things like Ben Drowned or these thousands of creepy Minecraft SMP series or whatever, or hacking, or empty lobbies of old games. Also, one of my favorite things, and correct me if I’m wrong, but it feels like at least one of the throughlines of the narrative of No Players Online is about the immutable part of oneself that’s left behind when you create something, especially for something that sticks around in a virtual space, or the ways in which creators let go of those parts of themself or perhaps refuse to, or the inherent souls that creations have. At least one of those notions is stated directly by Sarah toward the end of the game, but what are your thoughts on this beyond what was put in No Players Online? 

Adam: It’s good that you got that, I think I wanted to take the setting, with the desktop and the game and the story, to use those as a vehicle to talk about a lot of the things that interest me personally. Like this culture of hobbyist game development and having these forums on the internet where people just make things for fun, the culture around that and the personalities, and that was what the whole forum was about. But hundred percent, I think for me, I used to make so many small games, the reason why No Players Online is about all these small games is the same reason that SPOOKWARE was about so many small games, it’s because the only thing I really like doing is making a lot of small games. 

I think a lot about the fact that you do put something of yourself in a game, always. The kind of setting that you choose, the kind of things that you do when you make art in general it’s always a reflection of the person who makes it, and that’s also why Sarah is an artist, and John as well in a way as a game developer. 

Personally, I come from more of an environment where a lot of people around me are artists. My dad works for museums and is very much in the art world, but me as someone who makes video games and is a smaller artistic side of him, it’s like a whole different ecosphere, it’s much more like an environment that came from something that was more commercial from the get go. It’s always been like, video games are too commercial to really be respected as an artform from established arts. As someone who comes from more of this environment of more classical art, that was always a thing that I struggled with and still struggle with. That is a big theme in the game for that reason, because Sarah is a very classical artist, and John is a game developer, and even though they’re both artists, their worlds are so different. And it affects their relationship to a certain degree as well, because they really don’t understand each other’s work. 

Franny: And they’re expressing that grief and all of those emotions so differently throughout the game. 

Adam: Exactly, exactly. And I really wanted the game to be about that stuff, making the game about the fact that you put parts of yourself in it, it’s also why I put so much of myself in there, and why there’s so many of these topics that come up in the game. It’s not just about my personal experiences with making games, but it’s also my experiences with more like the established art world and also my relationships that I’ve had. I put in a lot of elements that come from my life and my perspectives into the game. I think it makes it more interesting for sure, to write what you know and use this kind of setting as a vehicle for talking about that stuff. 

Franny: Absolutely, and I feel like memory plays a big part in this, especially now that computers are really accessible and commonplace, I think we definitely tend to offload a lot of the effort of memory and presence onto our computers and social media whether it’s stuff like photos or writing or just like conversation and connection and it kind of puts us in an awkward spot when hardware can degrade and software can become corrupted or deleted, and No Players Online really couples that kind of digital dependency and impermanence with a literal external corruption with like the data and blood sacrifices, and the necromancy, and the sections with the park, and it really drives home both John’s motivation and his expression through this tech that he’s familiar with and then also Sarah’s imprisonment, merging that into this both physical and virtual space that reflects a lot of the spaces that are abandoned today, like dead MMOs and old forums. I feel like there’s something here to be discussed, like the haunted quality of those places or how, as time goes on, many of these virtual spaces also start serving as tombs.

Adam: Even the map, the CTF gulch, it kind of vaguely looks like old tombstones, like all the elements in the map, it’s kind of like a grave. And for the game, it was really important that there was so much symbolism, because we kind of know what the story is and we know the important memories of the walk in the park and stuff, and the point was, like what is haunted? They call a house haunted because it’s full of these bad memories that still remain, and that’s what the quality of something haunted actually is. 

So, these games are literally haunted because they’re getting corrupted by these memories, and these memories are getting put in there because the technology that John uses, he has to give a part of his soul for it to work, so every time you combine something, every time you infuse something, even though you’re taking these games and the souls of these games, parts of both John and Sarah get stuck in there as well. That manifests itself with the given tools of whatever game that you infuse. Therefore, it’s kind of constantly this conflict and this main scene of her dying in the park, the fact that that part is repeated over and over in different ways really drives down the weight of that memory, it being the darkest thing that keeps permeating through it. That was very much the intention there, about memory. 

It’s always been like, video games are too commercial to really be respected as an artform from established arts. As someone who comes from more of this environment of more classical art, that was always a thing that I struggled with and still struggle with.

What’s really fun while making the game was that – the specific sequence of them walking in the park came from a game that we made in the ARG for the original game and when we made that part, we kind of made it without thinking, well we kind of had an idea of like this is how Sarah died, but then actually it was from a YouTube comment that someone came up with the theory that she must have been blind, or going blind, and that’s why she drowned, and we kind of ran with that. 

So, for the new game, a lot of the things that we do, we develop it more organically. Every time we would add elements to it, we made sure that there’s always some symbolism, either to drowning, or art, or to this park, or the dog, and these symbols are constantly repeating. That was really fun to me, because it’s like every time we’d add a new part, we could be like “this is a reference to this, and therefore this other thing becomes foreshadowing.” Like, the audio player is like a record player, there’s a record player in the game as well, but then later on Sarah is the record. It’s these objects that keep coming back, and the more times it comes back, the more important it becomes. 

Like, the password for John’s account – sorry if this is a spoiler – is “sentimental” and the reason why we chose that word is because that is the song from the original game, but also because sentimentality is so much of what this game is about. It’s like, John has put sentimental value in every single object and every single small thing that reminds him of Sarah and it’s him not being able to let that go. All of these objects, like this vinyl player, the flag and the map, and all of these things have become sentimental things and that is cursing John, the fact that he put so much sentimentality into all of these things and he can’t let things go, ultimately. 

Franny: You can kind of see these elements pop up like the part in the house where you have to line up the frames, to get snippets of a conversation between John and Sarah, or the part in the art gallery where you have to go into dev mode and start deleting everything, like start sacrificing those pieces to make space in the memory. I almost expected a much more hostile final confrontation with John but once you get to him, and you and Sarah and John all come together in the last few levels, he’s more worried about what you’re doing, he’s trying to hang onto these shreds of Sarah. He’s not even angry with the player, it reflects that theme of obsessive grief that turns this familiar technology into a metaphysical space where he just can’t let go, where otherwise it would just be a dream sequence or something. 

Adam: Exactly, and there are two points – first of all, it was really important for us that there are no out of context moments in the game, like everything exists on the computer and like you say, even the memory sequence, it’s kind of alluded to that by the end of those memory sequences they’re very realistic, and the reason why they are is because it’s like the soul, it has become directed at that point to be able to shape the game.

It was really important that it doesn’t become this tropey thing but it’s always like everything exists within the physicality of this game, this program that John made that just becomes more and more powerful and more able to shape from their memories. There was even a fan theory that John and Sarah and everything aren’t real, it’s all just like a demon that shapes the whole experience to trick you basically into going into the game. Which I kind of like, actually, a good plot twist. (laughs)

But yeah, I think the other point is: what the original game was about as well is that my personal experience with game development is that everyone is scared about finishing things, like I used to make a lot of small games but I always finished them, and I never really leave my work unfinished. Something that I really dislike about the games industry is this tendency to leave things unfinished or this tendency to be obsessed with a project for many, many years. It’s like John is kind of this archetypal character, he’s someone who is way too ambitious with the things that he wants to make and can never, ever get it done. Ultimately, Sarah being stuck in the game and somehow he’s gonna revive her through that, it’s like an impossible task. But yet, he just keeps at it. He just keeps tinkering on the game, he can’t let it go because at a certain point he becomes more comfortable in this state of things being unfinished then actually getting it done. In a way he would actually be scared of finishing the game, or actually saving her. He finds comfort in the hope that it eventually becomes a routine for him to work on the thing a little bit every now and then. I think when you come and start messing with things and ultimately start destroying a lot of the work, he isn’t really mad at you because in a way he’s kind of enticed, like “oh this is a new thing for me to work on, a new problem.” He’s just finding an excuse to keep at it and constantly doing busy work so he never has to face the fact that he just, you know, has to kind of accept that Sarah is dead and to move on with his life, but he doesn’t want to.  

Franny: I also wanted to ask about the little games inside of No Players Online, were there any that were brainstormed but never made the final cut? 

Adam: Not really, actually. We were very economical. It’s the way that I work, honestly, when I put things in I put them in with the intent that it’s going to be part of the game. There’s really not much on the cutting floor. 

Franny: There are so many projects in my life that are unfinished, I admire that mindset, I could take notes honestly.

Adam: The mindset that I’ve always kind of had is that if the thing is not finished it doesn’t exist. So, it’s like, to me there’s no point if it’s not finished. And it’s like, otherwise you get stuck to this idea of what it could be and it holds you back from actually finishing it and it’s so much easier to cut things that haven’t been made than to cut things that have been made. That’s always been a philosophy that I’ve used with my work. 

Franny: That is so true. 

Franny: A note about the music, I went back and listened to the full album. It’s a really beautiful blend of like creeping atmospheric ambiance and distorted classical melodies, with some of the pieces for the small games that are really uniquely spot-on. Sometimes diegetic, sometimes not. What did the collaboration between you and Viktor Kraus look like, did you have any specific notes or direction or was it more freeform? 

Adam: I’ve been working with Viktor for a long time. The first thing we actually worked on together was the original No Players Online in 2019 and ever since every single game that I’ve made, he’s always on the audio for it. I think he’s really good because he’s really able to do a lot of different types of sounds and music, since he’s actually – you wouldn’t know it – but what he loves doing the most is like metal and hyperpop stuff. 

Making this game, I felt like I was torturing him the whole time because I was making him do the opposite of what he likes to do the most in his free time. Like as little sound as possible, like droning, you know, and then there are moments where he can shine and have, for example, the music in the dating simulator, which is very much a cutesy thing. He’s also very good at doing more of a classical or even orchestral thing. I think ultimately it is the fact that he’s so good at doing so much diverse work which really complements well with my skillset and also wanting to do a lot of diverse work. And No Players Online is so many different types of games, and therefore the sound is such a nice blend of so many different things. 

But then we use these genres also as symbolism, because all of the classical music and classical pieces in the game alludes to Sarah, because Sarah was very much into classical music. And then parts that are more like jazz are more like John. But then you have all of the themes for the other games but when they get added into the other games, some of the leitmotifs get carried over from those games, get distorted and reused in vague ways. 

And I think what was really fun was just being able to be like, I would always give him this direction of like, “for the park sequence, you just take this classical piece that is related to Sarah, but kind of distort it so it becomes something different” and he was always able to do it.

Franny: The memory stone songs in particular were very beautiful. Very evocative of their particular tragedy that you’re slowly uncovering. 

Adam: Yeah, exactly, and it also becomes much more like – like you said in the beginning almost all of the sound and music is diegetic, like the application makes the sound, stuff like that. When the morphs and the ending sequence becomes more clear, suddenly the music becomes more like instrumentation, like it’s composed for what’s actually happening on the screen, and that’s also very deliberate. 

Franny: And what are you proudest of, with No Players Online? 

Adam: I think what I’m most proud of is the fact that we were able to do so many different things and make a really, not short but, tight game. I think it does a lot of really interesting things, and it’s constantly surprising you. Instead of drawing things out, me personally, I want games to be shorter, I want games to be 2-3 hours long like a movie is. I think we had a good budget and good timeline for this game, and we could have made the game so much bigger, if we wanted to, but instead we used that time to refine and make sure that the pacing is very tight, and that it does a lot in a shorter time. Instead of like – constantly the game has like a new mechanic or new idea, and it’s there for five minutes and then it’s gone. I think, me personally, I really liked just to work on that constantly doing new things and I think it makes for a really surprising kind of result. 

And especially what I’m really proud of is that we made the game, that we made it on time, and we did it with the time we set out to do, and we didn’t kill ourselves working on this game. We had a very good work life balance and we basically didn’t crunch at all to get the game out the door. I’m very proud of that, that it just got done. 

Franny: It is a very tight, cohesive game. There are a lot of elements that might seem chaotic but it all comes together in this really nicely evolving emotional story. Also, I think I saw a big shared Google doc full of people discussing ARG stuff following the release of the game, is there more to come? 

Adam: There is definitely more to come, for sure. I won’t say too much, but the original game had an ARG and so we wanted the new game to have an ARG that’s much larger than the original one. Essentially we’re kind of doing it in phases, so the first phase of it has been solved at this point, like people have gotten to the end, and it gives a hint of like there’s more to come. So, it’ll go out in parts. 

Franny: Any final thoughts? 

Adam: Not necessarily. I think it was interesting that you said that you found the game very scary. 

Franny: (laughs) I am a little bit of a coward. 

Adam: It’s really fine, I think it’s good because this is definitely the most popular thing I’ve released in a while. Also, because it is such a big game so there are a lot of things happening, it was really interesting to see just how different this experience is for so many people. When you have such a big audience you can really see the diversity of experiences that people have for just the one game. For some people, we see them play the game and they’re just not phased by anything, and they just speedrun through it and then the game is done and it’s like whatever, like they didn’t feel a thing. And then some people would cry at parts, would enter the multiplayer game and then be scared out of their minds. There was one streamer with a heartbeat monitor and their heartrate would go way up and they’d be hugging the walls scared. 

Franny: There’s just something so dreadful about an empty lobby and a mysterious figure and the openness of it. It almost feels like, not in a bad way, but like suffocating. Where you really get to sit in it and let it build, and I think that was the scariest part for me. 

Adam: Thank you, I’m really happy that the game does so many little things and it talks about so many different things and has all of these different moments, and because of that I think there’s different parts that resonate differently for people. I think that’s what makes it a good thing. If it were just doing one thing, it might have been really popular for a typical horror game player, but it wouldn’t have been any fun for anyone else. I think the thing that we made now, even though it might have disappointed people who really wanted a big gory scary thing, by doing that, I think we reached a different audience of people that are more interested in maybe a little more depth or something. Or maybe some other kinds of work, although I will say that I’m sometimes worried that this game might not have reached those people because it’s still labeled a horror game. A lot of people might not play something just because it says it’s a horror game even though it might be for them. If I look at most of the horror games coming out, I’m still shocked that most of them are just like: I’m in space and there’s an alien. So, it feels weird to be sharing that label with them. 

Franny: It’s definitely more atmospheric horror. I don’t remember the exact wording of this post, and certainly No Players Online has reached a larger audience than this, but someone made a post somewhere that was like “you should be making art that reaches twelve specific freaks maximum and then don’t worry about everybody else.” (laughs)

Adam: (laughs) Yeah, yeah. I’m proud that the game is doing what it wants to do and that I didn’t hold back and try to do something more commercial or more broadly appealing. I think it’s very much a game that’s kind of hard to define what it is, it’s kind of hard to market it very well. I’m drawing people in mostly with the hook of like “you’re alone in this multiplayer game and it’s scary” and then that’s enough of a hook for enough people to buy it. Then, of those people who buy it, there will be some who are disappointed to find that it’s more than that, and then there are other people who will be delighted to find that it’s more than that. It’s those people that I’m happy to reach. 

Franny: No matter what, you’re gonna disappoint someone somewhere, but surprising people feels so much better anyway. 

Adam: Hundred percent.     

The post On Hardships and Horror – A Chat with Adam Pype of No Players Online appeared first on Gamesline.

Wander Stars is the second game to come out of Paper Castle Games, and it’s easy to see that this was a passion project. Visually, it’s eye-catching, perhaps influenced by artists like Rumiko Takahashi (of Ranma ½) and the big, explosive aura of Dragon Ball. The post-combat stat screen UI and graphics are very Persona with both a dynamic visual design of big blocky elements and jazzy music, especially when contrasted with the more traditional shonen anime style of the rest of the soundtrack. Everything has that CRT fuzz. Scenes go from vivid and polished to sketchy black-and-white for moments of intensity and drama, effectively so. I really try not to compare proper nouns to other proper nouns, but when the whole thing is sincerely and aggressively anime-inspired (and marketed as such), I’ll give myself a little break. None of this is a weakness, it’s actually what I like most about Wander Stars. Though this laser-focused aesthetic doesn’t carry the whole game into excellence, it’s clearly a love letter to art of an earlier time. 

Wander Stars is a few things in modest doses: deckbuilding, roguelite, dungeon crawler. Ringo is a student of kiai, the martial art of focusing energy and releasing it with an explosive shout, used here quite literally. The combat is turn-based and attacks are composed of words made up of actions (kick, punch, etc.) and modifiers that can increase damage, quicken cooldowns, apply elemental bonuses, widen the area of effect, and compound into some ambitious combos, like Fast Special Wide Poison Strong Punch or Cool Dragon Sharp Super Claw. Each word has a cooldown, whether it’s only one turn or eight, so there is some timing and resource management to consider. Over time your inventory of words grows with both experience and teaming up with characters across the story, and every episode opens by choosing which words you want to proceed with. Though there’s over 200 words to collect and use, on a balanced difficulty you can easily get away with a dedicated set of favorites, with a few specific exceptions where your progress might be impeded only a little bit by choosing nonoptimal words. 

Each turn lasts as long as you’ve got available slots, which allows some breathing room for using items, restoring cooldowns, and putting your guard up. Some battles are especially quick work because of this. There were definitely a couple of bosses where I got into a flow state of attacking with modifiers that reduce cooldowns and return health upon striking a weakness, and enough slots to hit a weakness every time, so every move was a crit and gave me a few bonus slots, which I then used to guard, and those reduced cooldowns meant I could do that successively, ending fights quickly with full health and no sweat. 

Every non-boss fight ends in either a Peace Out or a KO. Both are acceptable, but each enemy has a breaking point at which they will give up, usually a window of 3-5 health points, and you can accept their surrender or knock them out. It’s usually more to your advantage to allow them the graceful loss, but it can also be challenging to gauge how hard to hit to get to that sweet spot. Showing mercy and peacing out will earn you the respect of your opponent, and they’ll offer you a Pep-Up, which is just another modifier for things inside and outside of combat, like restoring health through traveling on the map, exposing enemy weaknesses at the start of a battle, temporarily increasing the amount of words you can carry through an episode, things like that. 

As exhaustive as that whole description felt, all of these elements come together to make a combat system that has the potential to be super customizable, though the wide variety of enemy type coupled with an inconsistent difficulty scaling, rigid weakness system, and hard-to-read mechanics often encouraged me to play more defensively than creatively. 

Each level is styled like an anime episode, with multiple stages laid out like overworld maps. These maps are traveled via nodes, and some nodes have a purpose for items, enemies, mystery encounters, and conversations. The item and enemy nodes are self-explanatory, but the mystery encounters can be anything from learning new words, to getting stuck in quicksand and taking damage, to just having an odd little moment with another character for flavor. Exploration down different branches of each level is typically rewarded, either with extra items or honor points to use at the end of the episode, but you do run the typical risk of frontloading your combat and being weakened for the eventual boss fight. Later episodes remedy the uptick in difficulty by providing little cafes at which to rest and recover, but some stages are rather grueling in terms of enemy repetition. 

Repetition is Wander Stars’ main flaw. As I said earlier, the combat and the enemy design can clash in ways that make clearing an episode feel like a chore the further you get. The weakness system, while it at least remains consistent along the same enemies, will occasionally pull tricks on you such as differentiating between moves of a similar type, so an enemy might be immune to one move, but not the stronger version of it, or vice versa, and if an enemy is immune to any mod, the entire move goes out the window. It’s easy to waste time and cooldowns on mooks that end up being way harder than some of their end-stage bosses. The same frustration that drove me to play defensively coexisted with a lack of unique challenge that gave me little reason to play creatively. 

Beyond that, the UI would kind of implode in on itself occasionally, most notably during the second phase of the final boss, when an explosive move turned into a damage loop with no end until I hard closed the game and had to do that battle over again. In fact, more frequent checkpoints would have been nice, as instead of going back straight to the boss, I had to play the entire final map over again. There were also several instances of elements of the UI not responding to anything, having to click things multiple times to engage anything, and moments where Ringo would clash with moving enemies on a node and instead of initiating battle, they would jiggle around helplessly until I reloaded the game.

The story is a high point, with competent writing (if a bit tropey at times), cute dialogue, and characters whose adventures I care about. It’s a traditional type of narrative that complements all of the other stylistic elements – hyper and intriguing, a strong focus on the strength and trust that builds between friends and loved ones, and the power of believing in oneself. And kicking and punching, and big explosions, and the slow burn from humble journey to cosmic battles. 

First of all, my problem is decidedly not with the queer wolf and his spurned ex-turned-pirate, it’s the fact that their inevitable reunion and rekindling felt like it happened half off-screen. One deep conversation cut short and several inside jokes later, and they’re basically good. It would have been nice to see more of the parts of their dynamic that draw them back together rather than the parts that continue to hurt. The emotional constipation is palpable. Though, it was also nice that a story of reconciliation between those two ran parallel to a budding affection between Canela and Ringo. 

The ending also leaves a little to be desired. After a few twists and turns, the group catches up with Ringo’s brother, Nashi, and the actual, for-real-this-time big bad – their father. This is – generously – hinted at and then swept away with his demise. It would have been interesting to elaborate on some kind of motivation other than he cares little for his kids and loves the pocket dimension (the dreamscape, where dreams are born) in which he has tormented his own son to the point of the two of them being locked in endless animosity. Ringo lives with their grandmother, what would she have to say about it? Upon being introduced to the idea that they could all just Stop This and Go Home, their father says something along the lines of “why would I want to do that? It rules here.” and becomes so powerful the only way to defeat him is to Shooting Star Spirit Dream Beam his ass. It’s a very funny development in the game about love and friendship and mercy, and if absolutely nothing else it’s at least breaking the cycle of tropes. I would have liked to know why he turned out to be such a miserable jerk, but hey, some people are just Like That. And after all of that, Nashi is accidentally left behind during the dramatic exit, having barely said anything this whole time.    

All of this is to say that the story was enjoyable, if lacking some elaboration. If anything, it sets up Wander Stars for a sequel, a second season if you will, pretty obviously. The writing, the jokes, and character work, all solid. The many, many winks to 90s anime, also solid. Given the chance to continue their stories somewhere down the line, I would hope for some tweaks to the combat, but otherwise would put up with that mild struggle to see it through to the end.

The post Nostalgia Ahoy! – Wander Stars Review appeared first on Gamesline.

SLICE hosted a lot of panels and “microtalks” with speakers of various backgrounds, and I tried to cast a wide net and attend as many as I could while covering a spread of different topics. The first block was three smaller panels mostly about storytelling and player motivation.

Cheryl Platz hosted the talk “Modern Motivators of Play,” and discussed why people play games, and the psychological needs that players are seeking to fill. There was a focus here on contrasts, especially between extrinsic versus intrinsic values that players gain from play, and the practical concepts of fun versus mastery or competition, and the intersection of those values. Overall, she introduced the many frameworks that developers can use to examine their relationship to their players and their motivations in a way that was grounded and realistic. 

Sean Vesce hosted the talk “Listening as a Design Superpower,” about the vulnerability of making and sharing art, especially in early stages, which is a common occurrence in game development, especially in terms of getting player feedback. A few specific notes I got from this talk: thinking of receiving feedback as building a muscle, building a community outside your own development team, and listening without the reflex that you’re losing creative control. Much of this talk involved ameliorating the common reactionary feelings that taking criticism often invoke – again a useful tool for any artist really, but especially those who rely on feedback to build a project. He also referenced Never Alone, a game made in collaboration with the Iñupiat people of Alaska, and how that process required listening and sharing, and honoring the world around them. 

Leah Hoyer hosted the talk “Importance of Story to Your Founder’s Journey,” which was about the story not only within a game, but around it. She starts with a question that comes up in articles sometimes: why do games still have narrative? A question with a flawed premise and an obvious answer from my perspective, but not so obvious if it keeps coming up in think pieces. She throws out the fundamental answers: it’s ownable, it differentiates one game from another, it creates conversation, it’s inexpensive, it keeps people coming back, and it provides the why. A story isn’t just in the game, it’s about the game, it’s a story about the studio or developer, the development, and the game itself – why should players or publishers buy it? 

Especially in a volatile market and an industry that’s already hard on developers and studios who have to do their own marketing, accounting, etc., there’s a need to understand what players and investors care about, and how a game lines up with it. I’ve seen the rise in players and fans taking more of an interest in the process and behind the scenes of games and studios, voice actors and artists, so it probably wouldn’t hurt to consider the story around the game as part of a core strategy. She ends on a foretelling note about understanding one’s own motivation: are you starting a studio to make games or are you starting a studio to start a business? 

Here’s where it starts to get interesting: the next panel I chose to attend was about AI. Specifically, it was titled “AI in Game Development: How Are You Using It?” I know, I know. I thought, would I not be doing my due diligence if I heard them out? Let me give the AI guys here a chance to defend themselves. What unfortunately followed would become the throughline of my impression of the day, if not the gaming industry as a whole, at least here in 2025. 

This talk was hosted by Chris Nemcosky, Justin Bailey, Jesse Helton, and moderated by Ric Neil. They represented different companies using AI in different capacities for game development both generative and analytical. I actually won’t go too much into the details of the talk itself – also I left 15 minutes in – but I will tell you much of this defense of AI in game development was introduced as “how to make a AAA game with a team of less than 12 people” and “how to make a character for less than $10k.” Considering those previous panels I attended had, at multiple points, spoken both about the scarcity of the market and the necessity for creative originality and collaboration, this panel felt like it snuck its way into this expo. Again I am reminded: are you starting a game studio to make games, or are you starting a game studio to start a business? 

For each company, there was a function they introduced. One was using original art to generate geometry and other assets with AI. The next was just text generation, for things like manuals and other tasks that would typically fall into the lap of a copywriter. In response to both of these, I would say this does not quite reach the lowest circle of hell, but I still don’t think game development is the place to take artistic AI shortcuts. 

The final example was forecast generation. From what I could gather, this program uses AI to predict how well a game would sell based on similar games. They used PEAK as an example, which didn’t clearly take into account basically everything else about it, what kind of game it is, the marketing behind it, the mechanics within and how that appeals to people, streamers, and other factors that I don’t confidently believe can be regurgitated into tangible results for what is simply Another Game Like It. 

The thought I keep coming back to is the fact that in Seattle alone, we’ve seen massive layoffs at some of our biggest and most profitable tech and gaming companies, game studios closed unceremoniously, upcoming titles cancelled despite the work already put into them, and some of the reasoning behind all this is cost-cutting, restructuring, and the growing budgets for AI. And that’s just in 2025. I can empathize with the desire to be able to make games even if you don’t have a lot of money to invest in it or a lot of people on a team, but finding new and creative ways to deny your work of human touch and a skilled person out of a paycheck isn’t the way to a bright future for the industry, for any industry. 

One of the speakers mentioned in their company’s own independent study of the market, they found that it was best to take a “conservative approach to AI integration” because “Gen Z and Alpha value authenticity” but that only manufactures permission to find the shortest route to the smallest amount of authenticity before AI is permissible to the projected audience. It feels paradoxical to frame that approach to game development in such a way – just enough authenticity to satisfy – and certainly more work than just approaching it fully invested with human labor and legitimacy. Why is the question “are the assets going to be made by humans” still up for debate?  

After looking around and wondering how many of the many, many people in the room were there for the same reason I was, I left to go catch the back half of the other main panel for that block: “Building Passionate Player Communities” – thank goodness. 

Hanna Fogelberg, Anthony Tešija, Gavin Eisenbeisz, and Brandy Camel were speaking, with Leah Hoyer from one of the earlier panels moderating. This talk brought everything back down to Earth, with how to connect with a present and potential audience, different modes of marketing, and what kinds of approaches to take. There was a focus on authenticity, not thinking of marketing a game as some kind of strategy, but rather being comfortable in the tone with which you address your audience naturally. In terms of promotional material, Hanna said “fuck AI slop.” 

This talk was more candid than I expected, but better for it. In particular, when discussing how to recognize one’s audience, they didn’t hold back on the reality of toxic communities. Brandy spoke up on this specifically, having been the person who announced Diablo Immortal at BlizzCon back in 2018, and said that building up rapport with the community helps to mitigate negative backlash and “if there’s anything you can own up to, own up to it.” One of them put it rather succinctly (paraphrased): ‘Shitcans aren’t your audience, so you don’t have to care about them, but dedicated players, modders, etc. are the people who you want to keep.’ 

In this new rise of certain demographics of gamers having rather unhinged reactions to video games with female protagonists, among other non-issues of diversity, there should be a push to deny them the satisfaction of getting their way. I’m sure it’s daunting to new and/or independent developers, but with the support of seasoned game industry people saying hey, don’t even worry about those people, we might just get through this era with our darlings intact. 

I had one more panel to attend before checking out one of the roundtable sessions: “Unity’s Indie Survival in 2025” with Major Nelson moderating the conversation between Tyler Wright, Andrea Roberts, and Nick Kaman.

Nick started this one out with a contemporary bit of advice (paraphrased): ‘There are too many good games. You’re not just competing with those, you’re competing with Fortnite and Netflix and going outside. You’re in the tough position of trying to be chosen for game shows or articles or getting streamed. Get good at the tools available so you’re not at the mercy of the gatekeepers of the industry.’ I can empathize with the constant struggle to be noticed, not to mention the added strain of whatever internal politics dictate the flow of attention.

The subject of AI came up again, as a rapidly-growing key factor of our lives as we know it. There was a little bit of a groan. Tyler started by stating the importance of understanding all the implications of it. Using AI to solve good game design, which hardly works, and not using generative AI but rather maintaining creator authorship and avoiding deliberately taking away opportunities. In other words, ‘finding a way to use AI without putting out questionable practices and output.’

Andrea added onto this, that as indies it’s important to keep an eye on how AI develops, recognize the unknowns. 

Nick called AI “a plague upon this Earth.” He elaborated by describing how it comes with so many problems that the games industry now has to face, like generative AI making art and music, and it sucks. It’s not the experience studios should want players to have. Then he says something that succinctly encompasses the problem I myself have with AI: ‘Games are art and art is made by people and AI has no ability to make art. I play games partially because they’re fun but also because they’re made by humans and I want to see that experience, that’s why I listen to music and go to museums.’ 

In settling the topic of AI, Tyler goes on to say that if you’re going to use AI, to go deep and learn how to use it responsibly, don’t let it replace your craft and make you lazy. This distinction between responsible and irresponsible AI use becomes more deliberate the further that AI technology advances, and has been a prominent sticking point in most of these conversations I’ve been observing. 

The rest of this panel is mostly spent on funding and marketing, the constant struggle within indie development obviously. There’s plenty of advice floating around, but a lot of it has to do with flexibility, networking, luck, sacrifice, and being in the right place at the right time. I think it helps to hear these stories to get that perspective, grow your own perception of what’s possible and probable, and to know you’re not the only one struggling to get funding or support. Some people are willing to go into debt, some people are willing and able to network their ass off, and so on. I feel like it’s about the same kind of sentiment I would hear when I used to ask people how they got into game writing and they would be like, “I saved someone’s life outside of a Panera Bread and it turned out to be the Narrative Director for Naughty Dog” or whatever. 

Toward the end of the day, I went to one of the roundtable sessions and, out of persistent morbid curiosity, I chose the one about AI. Specifically, “The Personal Ethics and Impacts of AI.” The moderator led us in a structured talk about the landscape and present moment of AI in games, and the livelihoods dependent upon and threatened by the expansion of it. 

We started with a series of questions about how we agree on what is and isn’t AI and what is and isn’t permissible from individual perspectives. With the table full of extremely varied backgrounds, including one of the speakers from the earlier panel about AI, there was no notion that AI is a monolith, and the limits of personal taste diverged along many lines. Fundamentally, there’s a gap between generative AI and functional AI, the art-scraping hallucination machines versus things like algorithms, mapping, functionality, etc. Part of the issue presented is looking for the ways that generative AI can be ethical, like having an in-house engine trained on consensually provided art or assets, but the financial and energy burdens still remain. 

Then we went into AI in education. Someone made the point that education is not about getting the right answer, it’s about learning the tools and reasoning to get to the right answer. Students that use ChatGPT to write their essays for them off of basic prompts, for example, lose out on the valuable processes of research, drafting, editing, and developing their own voice. The table discussed that while AI chatbots can sometimes be helpful in expert contexts where informed discernment exists, it’s more widely used at rudimentary levels and harms those early processes. A few unequal arguments were thrown around, at least one about not using electric cars simply because the charging ports aren’t common enough yet, so like many conversations about generative AI it went nowhere productive. 

Overall, the roundtable didn’t really bring up anything surprising, and while a valiant effort at productive conversation was made, opposing viewpoints on the topic of AI will usually refuse to meet in the middle. Especially on the topic of generative AI, there will always be a fundamental difference in perspective and opinion on the efficacy and ethics of it. Personally, I do believe there’s a right and a wrong answer, but that dichotomy will exist for as long as AI does. 

The moderator, at least, did a good job at keeping the conversation on-topic and meaningful, diverting away from arguments that were too personal or combative, and correcting genuine misinformation. He left us with the question: what do we want the future to look like in terms of AI? And my answer to that is: a portal back to the year 2018, but I digress. 

After the panel, the moderator – a local technical designer at Big Company – and a DigiPen student and I sat down to continue the discussion, because we all felt a little unsettled by the roundtable. This conversation was one of the highlights of my day. It was so candid and we all found each other on equal ground despite our backgrounds being rather distinct from one another. I have no quotes or paraphrasing for this, but the topics ranged from AI, generative AI in particular, the culpability (or lack thereof) of AI especially in terms of chatbot psychosis and other formed delusions, and the specific example of therapy professionals using ChatGPT to help them with clients. We went from capitalism to venture capitalism, prisons and housing to mental health and art and socialism. We truly went all over the place, and yet in this conversation was the reality that everything is connected, from generative AI and the billions being poured into it, to your tap water and the price of your rent.  

Not to be outdone by this growing discontent, I made my last stop at the indie game corner and talked to a couple of the developers about the expo itself and the Seattle indie community at large.

First I spoke to Gideon Moes from Ellensburg, developer of Night Spasm, a story-based adventure game that you play through every character in the story, to learn who they are and influence their decisions. The initial impression I got was this interesting blend of deep philosophical topics and unique omniscient gameplay with charming pixel graphics.

So, how was the process of getting into SLICE? 

G: Oh, the process? It was pretty easy. At first there was a little bit of information that I wasn’t sure about, but that was later updated, but signing up for it, getting the tickets, and actually coming here and being able to do everything has been very easy to navigate exactly where I need to go for the events that I want to see, and overall 10/10 experience.  

This is very much about not just Seattle but, you know, this general area of the PNW. What do you think makes games and game developers in this area unique, if anything? 

G: This is kind of my first time interacting with a big group like this, and I’m noticing a lot of patterns. First of all, like most, they’re all very friendly, they’re all very passionate and whatnot. One thing, compared to a lot of the other developers that I’ve met is that they don’t seem too much in your face. Like I feel like so many developers just want to tell you exactly what they want and then they really let you go. But this has been a very flexible experience and I feel like that has to do with the kind of people around you since most of them are local to Seattle and I’d say that’s the unique trait I’ve noticed in this event from all the people gathering around. 

Any other thoughts about SLICE, the area, game dev, anything like that? 

G: Seattle is a much cooler place for this kind of stuff than I thought. I never really took it as kind of a tech or game place but once I heard that slogan of “it’s the Hollywood of game development” I was like ‘oh my gosh, they’re right.” 

I also spoke to the folks – also known as Blue Comet Games – behind Magical Showdown, a team-based brawler full of vibrant magical girls. 

So, tell me about your experience at SLICE!

C: So far it’s been honestly just very nice. This is the biggest showcase we ever have been part of. We are based out of Washington, but mostly have been showcasing this on the eastside at smaller events, but we’ve had a pretty good time here. I’m very happy with the turnout and the response to the game itself. 

C: I will say this: Positives are a lot of nice talks. A couple of negatives, I feel like a couple of them may overlap a little bit, and early on I had some trouble figuring out that there was an upper area and a lower area to go to, and it almost felt a little bit out of the way. But overall, I would say I’ve had a very good time here, 8/10, easily 8.5/10. 

Do any of the talks stand out to you in particular? 

C: A lot of the fundraising and financial talks in general. Very very needed for like indie companies and they realize that when they were planning it. So, I can understand why they loaded up on those. But in general, a lot of these talks are relevant to indies and were very useful. 

And you both are based in this general area?

C: Washington, yes, I’m out in Bellevue.

J: And I’m in Capitol Hill. 

I’ve been hearing a lot about what makes this area special or unique? What do you guys think? 

J: In my opinion, I just think it is both simultaneously big but also very tightly put together. Like in spite of its size, there are a lot of people that you can meet who are just like ‘hey I feel like I’ve known you for several years now.’ I’ve been doing a lot of these Seattle events for a little over 5 years now, and I think of a lot of these guys as my close friends. Doing something like SLICE makes me feel like I’m meeting a whole bunch of new friends. 

A very tight, consistent community. 

C: Yes, like it’s a blessing in that you constantly meet new people but you also meet people that you know. I’ve met at least a dozen people that I’ve known from other events and I’ve been able to come around and say ‘hey, what’s up’ to, it’s very nice. 

J: It’s also a group of people that is always building other people up. 

C: We support each other. 

J: Like game development in general is very communal in that sense, but doing things like this in the Seattle Indies as a whole does nothing but put everybody up, makes everyone better. 

That’s so good to hear, because especially in things like art can be so competitive. I’m in the pro wrestling scene here and it’s a lot of the same sentiment – you see a lot of the same people, build a lot of these deep connections, try to build each other up and have this robust community. It seems like the Seattle Indies group encourages that kind of community and SLICE is a reflection of that. 

J: I just hope that SLICE could be just as big if not bigger than something like GDC, because it is really cool to have something like this so close to home. 

C: This has already been fantastic. I’m hoping it gets bigger and better somehow, but so far SLICE has been great.  

Seattle Indies did a great job in bringing their resources and philosophy to a bigger production like SLICE, even for someone like me who is not at all in the process of making any kind of video game, but likes to write about them from time to time. The span of experience and expertise within these panels and roundtables is welcome in an industry that still has so many unknowns and exceptions to generally well-trodden rules. It was communal too, though Seattle Indies hosts many smaller events, and gave a lot of creators room to share ideas and support. 

Despite my animosity toward generative AI and its encroachment into artistic industries, it can be worthwhile to not hide exactly what we’re dealing with. Without the discussion of AI, especially from companies who are profiting from it, we’re missing a huge amount of context for these spaces. 2025 is clearly the year that this has become a forward topic, and over the course of my 6 or so hours taking in this event, even when I wasn’t seeking it out, AI and the inherently oppositional viewpoints organically came up over and over again. Although I don’t necessarily want the discussion thrown out completely at industry events like this, it’s important to adequately address the effects these technologies have on the very communities that they’re seeking to ingratiate themselves within. Remember the layoffs, remember the real, breathing artists and developers, and remember the reason anyone is doing any of this anyway.

While I was perusing the indie game corner, I overheard a woman talking to a colleague and something she said stuck out at me. “There are visionaries and there are executioners.” I would agree, even though we seem to still be debating about who is who.

The post Impressions of SLICE – the (inaugural!) Seattle Loves Indie Creators Expo appeared first on Gamesline.

That’s right, It’s time for the Penny Arcade Expo talk. Join Lorelai, Franny, and a returning special guest in Solon as they talk about their weekend at PAX. It’s a long one as they go over everything they played at the show from big companies like Nintendo, Bandai Namco, Square-Enix, and Capcom to smaller companies like Buffalo Buffalo and Dread XP. We also talk about some of the outside events like the Seattle Indies, industry parties, and a whole discussion about AI in gaming.

You can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on Social Media @TheGamesline, Franny, Lorelai, and Solon.

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, and tell a friend about the show!

If you want to send in questions, send them to our email podcast@gamesline.net!

You can also join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Edited and Produced by Lorelai

Here’s an excerpt by Crystal:

Solon: We’ve been here for long enough where we’ve got some pretty specific PAX traumas. There’s some trauma response happening at certain points of PAX for me this weekend. Once I noticed that I was like, “Yeah, we’ve been here for a long time.” But, bigger picture, we have changed so dramatically since when we were 20 coming to this show, we have grown and evolved, the spaces that we take up are different, and because of that it allows us to have a lot more freedom than we used to have.

It’s been really good. It was very affirming to be on the PAX show floor and be like, “I am very different from how I used to be.”

Lorelai: All right, since we are running out of time, final topic before we go on to questions. For each of you, what is your game of the show that you played, and second, what game are you most looking forward to? Because they can be separate things. My game of the show was Towa, but the game I’m most looking forward to is Onimusha because it scratched my Nioh 2 itch.

Solon: Oh, that’s a really good question. I don’t have an answer yet.

Franny: It might be Entropy for both of me, honestly. It vibes with me so well. I did like Towa. I’m really excited to see how Valor Mortis shakes out. It’s gotta be Entropy, I think, for both. I had so much fun with it. 

Solon: I think the best on the PAX show floor, and this is gonna be really dumb, it was SpyParty. It was. Seeing SpyParty in the same corner that they’ve always been at, I got teary-eyed seeing them.

Lorelai: I remember when that game was first announced like 20 years ago, that’s the same corner, the same setup, everything. It was beautiful.

Solon: That ReedPop finally figured out how to get them back in there, it connected PAX tradition in a way that felt so validating and real; “Okay, things are kind of normal again, SpyParty’s here!” And getting to see kids playing SpyParty for the first time being like, “Woah, cool!”, and seeing people my age being like, “I gotta show you this game!” It was nice. That was my favorite. It hit me so deeply in my core, seeing them there and being about to cry. It’s like, “Wow! How have you been, old friend!”

The post The Gamesline Podcast Episode 65: The PAX Special featuring Solon appeared first on Gamesline.

We exist in a weird time and place to talk about Motherhood, considering the personal freedom to be or not to be one is constantly in flux and at risk. Even putting such a focus on that part of Leila denies the conceit of it – she was never supposed to only be a mother, no one is. Though, it’s hard not to centralize it. I grew up knowing that I didn’t want to be one, and that knowing has only ever been reinforced as I’ve grown older. My reasons are mostly practical, and as Leila’s own daughter remarks, with the world as it is, with things like climate change and the ever-growing economic disparity, why would I want to bring a new life into it? I like instead to watch Motherhood from a distance. There’s a thousand good reasons to go either way, and Leila tells a remarkably poignant story of motherhood as both a pitfall of her life as a whole person and her ultimate reassurance that, from the outsider’s perspective, is grounded and relatable. It’s really beautiful.
   
Leila isn’t just a nice story either. One of the most striking things about it is the art style, bright and sketchy at times, very classic point-and-click, becoming slightly more polished and realistic as the situation demands. One of my favorite scenes of the entire game is Leila floating on the water, reminiscing on all of the directions she wanted or thought her life would go, and then sinking beneath the water. Like Ophelia, serene and melancholy. Other scenes are displayed like backdrops of a play, traversing down a path through woods styled like layers of a pop-up book, or the manuscript-style depiction of the Persian story Layla and Majnun. 

The narrative dances around the issues of motherhood to the more granular anxieties most people have: feeling out of time and place, feeling like we won’t grow up ourselves until we have children (or rather, that being the outcome of the expectation that society puts on childless people), wanting to be everything, but being too assumptive we’ll succeed at nothing that we become stagnant. Ouch. 

Nestled between her childhood and adulthood, Leila deals with conventional teenage angst: homework and generational pressure and having a boyfriend who doesn’t care about you as much as you care about him. Trying to find a direction for your identity in books and hobbies and Marcus Aurelius quotes. Learning which masks you’re going to wear – the discarding of which involves ripping her face off entirely and piecing it back together as a small memory puzzle, a notion of sometimes having to remember who the real You is. The sting of shame and rejection manifesting as crawling under her own skin and becoming a seed that blossoms into a laughing flower – the sentiment that we can grow and thrive in spite of (or sometimes thanks) to the trials and traumas of a complicated adolescence.

Most of the puzzles are appropriately related either functionally or thematically to the narrative, all of them at least properly enmeshed in the setting, and all of them relatively easy (the metric I’m using is Me, who puzzles at, generously, about a sixth grade level), though sometimes the pieces of certain puzzles aren’t clearly defined. At times the puzzles feel more like a plain point-and-click, but otherwise they’re a clever device to move the story along. 

For example: one puzzle has the player moving Leila’s joints to contort her body in a box to reach the key to a dollhouse, and what she thinks is the safe, ideal option for life – husband, home, and child. In the desperate journey to rediscover what it means to live for herself, she cheats on her husband and damages the bond between them. But these scenes inside the dollhouse also reflect the effect that the drudgery of her routine – once a source of safety – has had on her. Her dollhouse life is once bright, the tasks quick, then later dark and stormy, with tasks taking longer, if they get done at all. 

The cleaning tasks involved a lot of small, repetitive back-and-forth movements using the mouse, and I genuinely had my hand cramp up during these moments. They would have been more effective if the earlier cleaning bits didn’t also take so long, but at this point in the story my hand was definitely hurting. It’s nothing if not an adequate translation of how hard these things become when you no longer have your heart in anything. If that was the intention, hell yeah, but be warned by this: if you’ve got sensitive hands, be ready to struggle a little. 

There’s another story within Leila – Layla and Majnun, a Persian poem about passionate but forbidden love, with puzzles connected to each arc: love, separation, reunion. It culminates in a scene about her affair – or rather, the consequence of it presented in abstraction – and I’ll admit I struggle to find the throughlines between the themes of the poem and what seemed like a random after-hours quickie with a barista. Perhaps it’s the disjointed presentation – in that you can choose to back away from parts of her life to explore other parts in the meantime – or the constraints of my own perspective. Regardless, this real-life representation of the character’s culture is interesting.    

The story ends with the strengthening of her connection with her daughter, but more importantly her connection with herself. She goes through the daily tasks that bring her peace and comfort, and connects with the world again. She sees her own life reflected in her neighbors, and finds community with the other women of her neighborhood. They sit around the fire and have a little moment of ritualistic whimsy, becoming a little bestial in their freedom, a tableau of unrestricted womanhood traditionally considered taboo. 

Mandy Zines and Ari Trash do a great job voicing adult and young Leila, respectively. Their comforting and organic performances might be too candid for some players, but I like the emotional quality of an imperfect performance, especially for a game that’s so singularly focused on one woman’s life.

Overall, though the narrative could be stronger, it tells the story it wanted to. The dialogue supports it in an unrefined way that reflects how people actually talk about themselves, and it allows Leila to dive deeper into herself and her subconscious. It feels like a long therapy session wherein she comes upon a breakthrough; meandering but not exhaustive. 

I will say, there are fundamental strings of Leila’s life introduced in the beginning that could be explored a little more, a little deeper. Not even in the way I sometimes want simply more of a game – this narrative would benefit specifically from elaborating her childhood. Leila’s main wounds were obvious, but the puzzle attached to that era of her life felt like something cluttered for the sake of being cluttered. As soon as we get a glimpse of her relationship with her father, we’ve moved on to the next phase of her life. Her affair, initially presented as a complicated moment of her life but not quite the central point of this examination ritual, seems much more important by the end, and yet the outcome isn’t clear. As is, Leila still works as a short, evocative, sometimes ambiguous narrative about a woman with a unique yet relatable life story who finds a way to make sense of it all. 

And while I hold that view of the narrative, I also accept the angle that we aren’t always able to dig into the formative events of our lives as deeply as we want to, and instead we have to make sense of the pieces. For how short it is, Leila does well with the pieces, and makes a satisfying enough ending out of them.

The post Puzzles and Motherhood – Leila Review appeared first on Gamesline.

• The game literally wouldn’t exist anymore without the player base and strong community bringing it back from the brink of death. 
  
• And the entire development team and company is under threat from losing their BIGGEST moneymaker if they do anything in bad faith regarding the player base – and will go under. This is why the new CEO (Jon Bellamy) is directing the company to branch out in other directions and create other types of games using the RuneScape IP—the shareholders don’t want to be beholden to the playerbase of OldSchool Runescape (this is my theory).

The classic protest protocol is to throw down cannons in Falador Square. It’s a riot symbol mostly BUT there are guards who wander around Falador Square and as many people kept actively feeding cannonballs and firing, it was an ACAB statement as well. We got a lot of bigots banned for hate speech, but their voices were tiny and pathetic compared to our cacophony. Runescape subreddits are full of posts dunking on the CEO right now.

(SapphicRowan provided screenshots of these in-game protests.)

In one of them, flowers swarm the whole ground: That’s actually because someone was growing them in swastika patterns but an impromptu anti-flower countermeasure coalition was spontaneously formed to flood the whole area with a field of flower seeds, erasing the hate symbols almost as soon as they appeared.

Franny: Based on what I’ve read, the mods and other staff are kind of in resistance with the players against the CEO and Jagex, too. 

Rowan: From what I have put together from various sources, the Mods hosted – on their own time – the Pride March stream and giveaway. This is where the mods lead us in a march around part of the world. The video of the stream wasn’t up on the YouTube channel for rewatch for the first day or so afterwards but they did put it up on the official YouTube channel, possibly after complaints.

That’s where I first heard about this, directly from the Play and Jagex moderators at the in-game Pride march. We’re very lucky that a pretty big queer content creator (RenderScape) was covering this and spreading the word. 

The Pride Event is an in-game temporary quest with a short storyline and NPCs and some pride gear as a reward. They’ve been well-done and very sweet and have referenced historical queer icons. […]

To be clear, one of the oldest defining traditions of RuneScape is for Mods to create & host fun little events for the players on holidays—Halloween, Christmas, Easter, Game Anniversary, and most recently Pride—to show their appreciation for us and celebrate with us.

Franny: There seems to be a larger and longer-historied queer community in RuneScape, especially Old School RuneScape than I had any idea about. What can you tell me about that, and your place in it? 

Rowan: I made the clan with my best friend in OSRS—Local Honey—almost 4 years ago now.

Back then, I didn’t know any other queer people in OSRS. I met Local Honey as one of the only queers biting back in a very homophobic and transphobic minigame chat that we happened to find ourselves together in, on a dedicated mass-player world for that minigame. We decided to hop to another world and have our own game just to ourselves so we could chat without a flood of grossness.

It was an extremely cozy and bonding experience as the minigame, called Wintertodt, is about fighting off a giant freezing ice tornado entity by helping Pyromancers keep magical fires alight. We spent a long time there and became best friends, eventually seeking to gather together what friends we had made and try to make a safe queer space for people to hang out and game with each other, away from the places which inevitably turn toxic due to the mass of players. Turn off Pub Chat, tune into Clan Chat.

RuneScape was a safe haven in our childhoods from real life bullies and insults, and the Gender-changing Makeover Mage Pete/Peta has been in the game since its ancient history, helping to guide players on a test journey in a virtual world with a different gender presentation then they’re used to, if they so wish. Always reversible, always re-reversible.

Here’s the totally-not-queer Barber, from whom I got my first haircut which was allowed to be long – because it was just in a game. (Riot ongoing in background—Yes, the famous riot spot in Falador Square is directly across from a queer barber—I’m sure he very much supports it, as well as the people removing Nazi symbols from the front of his shop).

Franny: Despite the fact that Jagex and RuneScape seem to have always been inclusive and later explicitly supportive of its queer community, why do you think they’re backing away from it now, even when members of their own team disagrees with the idea?

Rowan: It’s very simple—CEO Jon Bellamy is a spineless coward who has caved in to his fears of what pathetic bigots on the internet might say, instead of embracing the community who dearly cares about the game he is in charge of guiding.

Back in 2017, Jagex had a notable bout with the anti-queer gamer crowd when they introduced a quest called Gilbert’s Colours, which involved finding the six strands of a rainbow and returning them to an NPC who would then give the player a rainbow scarf. It became a sort of manufactured controversy, wherein this single rainbow scarf was deemed too political, irrelevant, and inappropriate for a kid’s game by a portion of the player base. It sparked an unbelievable backlash of in-game riots where many of the participants weren’t even active players, but rather people who had hopped on from outside bigoted groups, and a disturbing amount of death threats and harassment directed at Mod Wolf, who created the event. RuneScape no further Pride events until 2022 because of it, but even the mod’s creator went on to say his only regret was “caving into pressure, fear and hate”—the same fear and hate that Jagex is now using as a reason to scale back Pride events nearly a decade later. A few years of resumed (and well-received) Pride events now facing an interruption out of fear of more manufactured controversy, would empower the same people who were sending death threats to RuneScape mods the first time, and it sends a completely backhanded message to the community Jagex is, in the same breath, promising to support.    

The main thing that strikes me as odd about this whole thing: why has Bellamy—speaking on behalf of Jagex—made an explicit statement about this fear of backlash, the perception of queer content as controversial, when they have an established routine of these events. RuneScape isn’t alone, either. Many other games and studios have consistently shown up for their queer players without crumbling under retaliation. Games like Warframe, Destiny 2, and Baldur’s Gate 3 have done just that and continue to do it. Studios like Bioware and companies like Wizards of the Coast continue to do it. RuneScape would be fine, especially continuing as they have been. 

To get some more perspective on this, I spoke with RenderScape, a player and RuneScape content creator in the UK. 

Franny: How would you describe the queer RuneScape community and your place within it?

RenderScape: So, I can only talk for Old School as that’s what I’m part of, but I’d say OSRS’s queer community is the game’s most dedicated, yet under-served section of the whole game. LGBTQ players routinely complete some insanely impressive in-game feats, and yet never receive the recognition that would be given to cishet players achieving the same thing. Queer players just do not pull the same numbers on social media that cishet ones do, I think as a combination of people ignoring them and the queer folk themselves trying not to draw too much attention to themselves to avoid too much hate.

OSRS‘s biggest content creators are also almost all straight guys with dubious at best track records on allyship. Bigotry is allowed to run rampant in their fan bases because they either don’t care or don’t want to risk losing the money from the viewership. Some are also clearly just bigoted themselves but Jagex refuses to ever address it, and even awarded one of the most notorious creators a “golden gnome” which is an award for making content that Jagex gives out once a year.

This is all to say that the LGBTQ community of OSRS has not been well served by Jagex, and the pro-Pride push we’re seeing now has been fuelled by years of frustration on their part for the way they are treated by large parts of the player base and the company itself.

As for my place, I should state that I’m a cishet guy myself, just so I don’t mislead anyone. I became known as “OSRS’s Biggest Virtue Signaller” by the right-leaning players on Twitter when I started calling out the horrendous way they talk to LGBTQ players, and I ended up adopting that title ironically as a way to stick it to them. Since then, allyship has become a big part of what I create and talk about. I built a substantial LGBTQ following because, in their own words, I was one of the only OSRS creators who was a safe space for them, since almost none of the large ones had any interest in ever taking a stand for them. 

This video showcases some of the stuff I’ve made in support of my queer friends. And they always loved to see it because it made them feel seen. And so, I’ve become something of a symbol for the “woke” side of OSRS, which is a good or bad thing depending on who you ask. 

Franny: Can you speak to some of the in-game feats you mentioned earlier? Just to get an idea of what that looks like to someone not familiar with RuneScape.

RenderScape: Of course! So, by in-game feats, I’m talking about achievements and accomplishments in game. OSRS is defined by extremely long grinds and our LGBTQ players are some of the most dedicated players around. One notable one is my friend Witch Aileen, who is the rank 13th Hardcore Ironman in the game, which is very impressive as this means she has both never died in-game and also never traded with any other player. This stuff is a big deal to RuneScape players, I promise!

Franny: In your words, what kicked off the protests in OSRS and what’s been the general vibe around them?

RenderScape: The spark that ignited them was definitely this Reddit post talking about the Pink News article. Once that hit the front page of r/2007scape, people started assembling in-game to make a fuss. The vibe is very pro-pride, pro-LGBTQ, and very anti-Mod North. 

Counter-protesters do show up but they’re small in number and very quickly drowned out by the majority. Everyone is wearing colourful outfits, trying to spread the message, but also have a bit of fun with and make friends. It’s been an amazing opportunity for the often fragmented LGBTQ groups to find each other and start connecting.

Franny: Why do you think the CEO made this decision, despite Jagex already having gone through something similar in 2017, especially with this response backlash from the community and the RuneScape team?

RenderScape: If I may be blunt, the reason Jagex canned Pride is because North (or the shareholders he represents) already wanted to get rid of it. Pride has never caused players to quit and hurt their finances, and anti-Pride sentiment has been on the decline since 2022. The 2024 event had such little hate thrown at it that it barely registered. We know they didn’t scrap Pride to save development time because it was mostly already done and the devs offered to work for free to finish it on their own time, and yet were still denied the right to do it. I feel they are scrapping it now because the way the world is going right now, with us slipping backwards on a lot of progressive issues, they feel they can get away with it like many other companies are also doing by rolling back DEI and removing rainbows. 

Simply put, Jon Bellamy is either a bigot himself, or cares so little about queer folk that he refused to push back on whoever told him to do this. There is no logical or business explanation for the removal of Pride. It’s incredibly popular with OSRS players. 

The community has also really come together to try and make something positive about this, a Discord group got set up earlier [last] week for LGBTQ RuneScape players and has hit over 300 members already, which is pretty substantial by our usual standards.

Franny: In that Q&A, Bellamy spoke about how he knows OSRS is a safe space for queer players and wants to support that community, or the staff, in other ways, though of course it’s only been a few days or so, the results remain to be seen.

RenderScape: I feel he’ll say whatever he thinks will keep him out of trouble, while continuing to do whatever he wants. He can’t make any claim for keeping staff safe when we have players harassing jmods and getting them attacked by [infamous Twitter trolls] and doing absolutely nothing to stop it. He can’t claim to be protecting players when the removal of Pride has emboldened the worst side of the player base to start slinging f-slurs again.

Franny: Obviously there’s a desire for it, even just judging by the attention around your post in the subreddit, and between now and 2022 Jagex already withstood any backlash that was to be had. By making a public statement about rolling the events back, he’s just ripping open an old wound. And well, I’d also love to know about the inter-community responses! Like I said, I’ve been speaking with a friend who’s telling me about the protests, but I see you’re also working to promote queer artists, and have the community-organized Pride events taken on a new tone? 

RenderScape: You’ve put that perfectly, it really is like an old wound! And yes, the tone has certainly changed. When I first started planning the event, it was going to be this small gathering to have a bit of Pride fun. We suspected we weren’t getting a Pride event but didn’t know the full story, so it was fairly chill. But when the news article came out, it really exploded the enthusiasm players had for a big Pride gathering. Ironically, the cancellation could lead to the OSRS community having an even bigger Pride event than ever before! It became very apparent from my perspective that the queer community both needed and wanted more, so I started expanding the event plans into a much bigger deal than the initial small gathering. 

Franny: I feel like these online spaces are so parallel to real life, resistance matters here too. Like, it’s really not just about RuneScape, it’s important to resist bigotry everywhere we can, physical or not. 

RenderScape: My thoughts exactly! Exposure to people different from ourselves builds tolerance, and that counts whether it’s in the real world or the virtual one. These days a lot of us are spending more time in the latter than the former anyway.

At the conclusion of our chat, RenderScape connected me with some other members of the community. As someone who’s—again—unfamiliar with RuneScape, I wanted to gather more voices about the relationship between RuneScape and its queer players, and how this decision has affected them, so I asked for some statements.

Eme/Devotedpupa: Well I’ve been playing since 2006 and honestly I can say that this news [was] a bit soul crushing. Runescape was my first MMO and the unexpected joy I felt when first changing my gender with the Makeover Mage all those years ago remains a formative memory as a young NB person from Mexico. Even more recently, the Pride events felt… different from pandering from other games. Not only the rewards (I wear my NB flower crown for 90% of my gametime while skilling), the actual events feel genuine like no other thing like in the gaming space. The last couple Pride events have [dealt] with the history of our community and the struggles of trans folks in such a heartfelt way, I was honestly amazed. there’s a saying that you don’t quit Runescape, you just take breaks. Well, those definitely [played] a role in me coming back to OSRS. They didn’t feel like corporate rainbow Doritos®, they felt like some of the mods CARED. Mod North really did something unnecessary and heinous removing the events.

Sweater Paws: As of writing this, Runescape’s queer community is on Day 6 of rioting. We’ve been met with death threats and harassment, along with a slew of other nonsensical arguments, such as :keeping politics out of the game”. The main flaw in this argument is that the removal of the event itself is inherently political.

First and foremost, the cancellation of the event is a result of Mod North caving to pressures from one specific side of the political spectrum, at the detriment of the other. That is choosing a side, no matter how it is phrased.

From another angle, the ability to call oneself apolitical is a privilege. It is claiming that you are above issues, since they do not affect you. Your rights are not actively threatened, so you may fail to see, or willfully ignore, why this is such a big deal. They fail to see how deeply ingrained politics are in every aspect of our lives. Everything touched by a government entity is a matter of politics.

When my rights are threatened on a nearly global scale, having a game like Runescape, of which I’ve been a player for nearly two decades, suddenly flip their script and decide that my existence is ‘too controversial’, is akin to being told that I am no longer welcome somewhere because of my identity. Whether they like it or not, whether that is the intent or not, that is the message that is getting out there. That me, and my queer friends, are too dangerous to be celebrated.

In the end, what is left of this so-called safe space they claim to “protect”?

Newt: I’ve been playing for the better part of 15 years. The cancelling of Pride just makes me really sad, it was always fun and you could tell there was some real passion behind the events from some of the developers.

The worst part of this is that bigots are often emboldened by backing down more than even direct support; so North coming in and unilaterally canceling any official support of Pride is just telling the bigots that Jagex listens to their hate, even ignoring their own players to do so.

Ellie: I’m part of the LGBTQIA+ community and also play OSRS at a high level.

Jagex removing the pride event when it was already made in light of the current “world events” is so against what the community is and how the Jagex mods have poured their hearts into the game. The implications are that it communicates that LGBTQIA+ people aren’t welcome in the space that we exist in online and even moreso irl. Queer people are some of the most inclusive and loving people and to hear that mainstream don’t want us to exist is heartbreaking.

I feel like we have been loud enough at this point and to not get any word from the CEO is deafening. He has ruined all good will and burned any trust he had coming in.

OSRS is not just a game or space. It’s a community where we all go to hangout and feel a sense of progression and accomplishment. The world doesn’t give that in the slightest currently.

Astra Vampyre: I’ve been playing the game for about 5 years now, and as a trans woman, I always look forward to the Pride events. While the events themselves are typically short miniquests and may not seem terribly significant at face value, seeing myself and others like me represented is incredibly important. I think that the inclusion of such events have helped LGBTQ players feel more at home and welcomed in the community, and helps to remind us that we are accepted and that we are not alone. This has been very impactful for me, as there have been times in my life where I felt very isolated and like I had to hide who I was.

I think that the CEO’s decision to remove this event is incredibly cowardly, and is ultimately giving into a hateful (and unfortunately very vocal) minority of the playerbase. The large majority of players I have talked to are either in favor of these events, or indifferent to them. The events themselves require very little development time, and the team at Jagex has even offered to work on the events on their own time. I see no reason why these events should be discontinued, and it is incredibly saddening and disappointing to see the CEO give in to such hate.

I have cancelled my subscription, and I encourage others to do the same until this decision is reverted.

Sophie: I’ve been playing Runescape for over 20 years now, and it has meant a lot to me during various times in my life where I faced different struggles. One of these struggles was with my gender and sexuality, which I resolved by transitioning! Even back way before this would happen, I always remember playing as a female character in Runescape because it just felt nicer to me. With the launch of OSRS in 2013, I would eventually start playing again in 2017 or so, and really struggled to resonate with the community for a long while. The protests and backlash to the original Pride event back then still resonate in my mind and while I can take comfort knowing that many of the protestors were in fact not regular players of the game (as one of the former head moderators has stated), future events were canned. Nearly 10 years later, that pain is still fresh with this year’s cancellation. All around us, those of us especially in the US and UK, there’s been a massive and well-funded hate campaign directed towards trans people, and though I may not need the escapism as much as I needed to growing up, it still meant a lot to me to have Pride events in Runescape. I’m surrounded by so many other trans and queer friends that play the game now, and we have a lot of communities for each other, yet I still struggle to recommend friends to play Runescape because bigotry is still yet very common in the community, especially in high level PVM and skilling clans. The cancellation of Pride events enables the loud bigoted minority to feel validated in their hatred and makes Runescape even harder to recommend and is a financial loss for Jagex – I’ve seen several friends opt to quit already. Those who were against Pride events in the first place would never cancel when they did happen, but that non-action does not go both ways.

Morfred: I’ve played OSRS on-and-off ever since I was a kid, and I’ve had the fortune to witness the OSRS Pride events through two lenses: First, when I returned to OSRS around COVID, I had known I was Bi for a while, and felt pretty safe in my day-to-day life when it came to that. Second, the 2024 Pride, which had a very large impact on me, and resulted in me realising I was non-binary\I’ll mostly focus on the second point of view, and how it leads into the lack of a Pride event in 2025.

When OSRS Pride 2024 came around, the main character of the story – Kit Breaker – is heavily implied to be Trans, to the point that I’d not even really call it an implication. I didn’t realise it immediately, but seeing a character visibly working through gender-related issues made me realise things about myself. Pride needs to continue in any game that it would suit, so that people can interact with identities they may not see day-to-day.

However, we know that OSRS has cancelled Pride this year. Of course this sucks: it’s cut content. But what impacts me the most is the rise in hateful activities in the community. Reports of players using seeds to plant flowers in the shape of swastikas, slurs, and relating both sexuality and gender identity to pedophilia and harm to children – the latter of which I’ve been subject to at the Falador protests, as I’ve been wearing the non-binary colours. Gender identities seem to get the worst of it (not that anyone comes out on top, really), with lesser slights being messages of ‘Two Genders’, or LGB-minus-T speaking points like ‘Is this gay pride, or gender shit?’.

Jagex is a British company, and in the UK we have a struggling Trans community, which make up 0.5% of the population, but are twice as likely to be victims of crime than cis people (according to the home office figures), with an increase in hate crimes, especially since the recent UK ruling regarding Trans rights in women’s spaces, which has ended up with Trans folks being advised to just… avoid gendered public bathrooms altogether. With all this going on in the background, Jagex should be supporting those that are struggling to stay safe themselves, not just ignore them. Instead the CEO demands the removal of a complete/nearly complete Pride from the game for being ‘controversial’, whilst still selling Pride merch. It clearly indicates that we’re only good for them so long as we give them cash, and that stings when the creators that actually want to support us but can’t.

The CEO’s choices have shattered any goodwill I had with Jagex.

When my country is turning back the progression of social changes, the last thing I want is senseless bigotry being thrown both at queer players and queer jmods, emboldened by the choices of a CEO.

Birdhome: The stance Jagex and CEO Mod North has taken on this issue is plainly wrong. Withdrawing support for Pride within the company hurts the community. Old School RuneScape has always been a game made by the players and for the players. We (the players) want Pride in our game. The removal of Pride effectively communicates that Jagex does not want us in their game. I can’t help but worry that the events we are witnessing signify a greater culture shift within the company leading towards a future where the voice of the player base no longer matters. We, as a community, simply cannot stand for this. It is in the best interest of our games long term health to continue to provide a safe and welcoming environment for marginalized players. The leadership team at Jagex should be ashamed of themselves for abandoning the players and developers who work so hard to make this game as incredible as it is. I implore them rise to the occasion while there is still time for them to right this wrong.

Oog: I’m the administrator of a Discord Server called Rainbow Road, which is a space for LGBTQIA+ RuneScape (both Old School and RuneScape 3) players to gather and hang out, plan events, and find clans or other communities of like-minded people. Render and I have been friends for a while and managed to independently decide to put together some kind of community-run event since Jagex was holding out on us. The day after I opened up the Discord server, the Pink News article dropped and between Render and I, we managed to grab a pretty significant chunk of the LGBTQIA+ RS community on social media into one space where, so far, it has worked extremely well even though a significant portion of the community has history with each other. We’ve managed to come together and put aside whatever beef for at least a while and focus on the one thing we all have in common. Even bridging a gap between OSRS and RS3 is more difficult than you might think, but we’re doing that too. We’re planning to continue running pride events all year and trying to make enough noise that Jagex’s CEO cannot ignore us.

I’m a cis pansexual man and I have been a RuneScape player for almost as long as the game has existed. My original account was registered sometime in January or February of 2001, when the game was about a month old. I was a young teenager at the time and RuneScape was the first game I had ever really been social in. I grew up in a very rural area in Appalachia and my exposure to anyone that wasn’t white, cis, and hetero was pretty limited. My parents were bigots in every facet of the word, but my dad especially hated queer people. He told me as a young kid that if I turned out to be gay that he’d consider it a failure and kill himself. I was raised to believe that gayness was a sin of the highest order. When I was in my tween years and starting to get the feelings tweens do, I noticed that I didn’t only get those feelings for girls but I was always too afraid to ever admit anything like that. I hated myself. I was terrified of what would happen to me for being that way.

It wasn’t until I started chatting with some people on RuneScape that I started to really understand what I was feeling and feel less like it was a problem. A group of friends I had met while playing one day invited me to their IRC channel and I hung out with them and chatted. We were all around the same age and it turns out that the whole group was LGBT+. I never told them about my feelings or anything, I was just the “straight friend” in the group but seeing them be unapologetically queer was eye opening for me and started me down a path that eventually (almost 2 decades later) led to me accepting myself as pansexual. Pride was not a thing in games back then and especially not in RuneScape, but when we finally got a Pride Event, I thought back to those friends and how, despite their temporary presence in my life, their influence on me remains eternal. Pride isn’t just about the cute cosmetic items we get in-game, it’s about being accepted for who we are and sharing ourselves with people who’ve felt our struggle. It’s about knowing that, while the real world wishes we’d disappear, the virtual world we also inhabit doesn’t want us to be invisible and instead gives us ways to express our true selves through the little pixels on the screen. It allows us to see another avatar in-game and even if you never speak to each other, you know you two are at least a little connected.

RuneScape is slow and deliberate in many ways and [at] other times hectic and chaotic. The narratives are whimsical and goofy but also sometimes a little heartbreaking or terrifying. The world in the game was shaped by religious ideologies and political aspirations. All of these things mirror our world and make it feel alive, and somehow in the middle of it all there is this mage that you can talk to that can change your character between body types. The mage constantly flips back and forth too. The Makeover Mage has been there for decades and has always given players the opportunity to express their character in a different way if they choose. It was never controversial, and the game even required male characters to change to female for a quest at one point. Prior to the Pride event’s introduction, this was the smallest glimmer of queerness we had in the game. An NPC whose creation was mostly one of function, but whose significance to a number of queer people could not be overstated. Pride made us feel like we belonged just as much in Gielinor as a Pride event makes us feel welcome in real life.

Jon Bellamy’s unilateral decision to cancel a finished event is a direct attack on us and is not taken lightly. We’ve been actively protesting in-game for 6 days at the time I write this, and soon will have achieved the longest in-game riot in the history of the game. The kind of people that are happy about Bellamy’s decision are the people in-game creating swastikas out of flowers or fires, and attempting to trade us a chair and a rope, their not-so-clever way of telling us to kill ourselves. They’re the people that show up and spam slurs, or have names with slurs, or names that reference Hitler. These are the people Bellamy sided with over the ones who’ve passionately enjoyed RuneScape for two decades. […]

It might sound a little silly for us to be so invested in a medieval point-and-click MMO game, but it’s our silly medieval point-and-click MMO game and it’s been our congregating space for 20+ years. Bigots can’t have it. We’re not allowing it.

Sage: I’m transfemme, and RS was one of the earliest hints at my gender identity for me nearly 20 years ago. (Thanks, Makeover Mage!)

Pride events made us visible, they gave us time to celebrate each other and form communities together. Removing the pride event was such an abrupt slap in the face-  Calling our identity ‘too political’ is gut wrenching. It has done nothing but embolden the people who spew hatred and slurs at us. And those same people see Jagex as endorsing their behavior, telling us directly that “Jagex sided with them” and not us. 

Jagex sided with hate, plain and simple, with this decision.

Brew Sipper: Runescape to me has always been a way for me to escape the world around me and immerse into a fantasy, where I am creating my adventure with millions of others. Over the two decades I have been a player of this game, I have made so many friendships, created so many memories, and accomplished goals I am genuinely proud of myself for achieving.

To say Runescape is a big part of my life is a wild understatement. I even have a tattoo of a blue partyhat on my arm! (IYKYK)

I am also a part of the LGBTQIA+ community. I am proudly demisexual, pansexual, and non-binary. I have felt that I was different my whole life, but it wasn’t until coming into community with other queer people that I learned about the feelings I had. Through the struggle of realizing my self-identity, I found comfort, peace, and pride in myself that I had never felt as a straight man. Pride to me is about honoring the people that came before me in the struggle, the friends that have stuck by me through everything, and myself for having the courage to say my differences are valid and do not disqualify me from a happy and fulfilling life

So when I heard the news that Mod North the CEO of Jagex (the company that owns Runescape), had canceled this year’s in-game Pride event, I was beyond heart broken. I looked forward to this event every year since it returned in 2022. See, I say returned because the first Pride event in Runescape happened in June of 2017, after a gay developer in Jagex created the event, celebrating the LGBTQIA+ community in Runescape. The event received incredibly visceral and violent backlash from a very loud minority of players, including homophobic and transphobic flooding in the comments sections where the event was posted, in-game protests where people spammed slurs of all types and wished violence on the queer community, and even death threats against the developer of the event, to the point that the developer left Jagex and cut ties all together with the community. When Pride returned in 2022, I saw it as the company having the backbone to stand up for the large LGBTQIA+ community that has always, and will always be, a part of the Runescape community.

But the new CEO of Jagex, Jon Bellamy, or Mod North, shut down this year’s pride event over fears of “backlash”. After an earlier article was posted about the event being canceled, a Jagex Moderator posted on Bluesky, saying not only was the article true, but the situation was so much worse than we thought. Internally, developers had volunteered their time to create the event, working for free and after hours, and had nearly finished the event. When they presented it to the Bellamy, he shut the project down, and over a meeting told everyone that there would be no official pride event in OSRS this year. Those same developers decided to host a parade in-game for Pride on their own, using their personal laptops and streaming the event from home, but they were not able to deliver to the community the event they had worked so hard on.

In my opinion, Jon Bellamy should be ashamed. What his actions have shown to bigots and trolls is that with enough pressure, they can get their way. He has said without saying that hate can be weaponized against marginalized groups in his games. His failure to demonstrate even a base level of respect for such a large portion of his game’s communities is very telling of not only his feelings towards queer people, but the climate he is creating within the company for queer employees of Jagex. His messaging is loud and clear, and we hear him all [too] well.

Kama: As a trans woman with a lot of queer friends of all flavors it was obviously upsetting not only seeing the lack of representation for most of my close OSRS friends, but that it happened only because the hate of the few was loud enough to do so.

But even with that, the fact that it sparked so many people to get together and make their own community pride with blackjack and hookers in response that it’s kinda hard not to feel hopeful that things’ll be alright in the world.

RuneScape is slow and deliberate in many ways and [at] other times hectic and chaotic. The narratives are whimsical and goofy but also sometimes a little heartbreaking or terrifying. The world in the game was shaped by religious ideologies and political aspirations. All of these things mirror our world and make it feel alive, and somehow in the middle of it all there is this mage that you can talk to that can change your character between body types.

I’m sure you heard that a few years ago (2017?) the original Pride event was met with right wing riots including people dressing up in desert robes and hoods to paint themselves as klansmen, and jagex (rightly) stamped on that shit, and many jmods (notably mod ash) have previously firmly responded to bigotry on social media by politely telling them to leave, more or less.

Of course, this decision by the CEO is cowardly and seems to go against what much of the jmods who actually engage with the community want, and is shown to be extra hypocritical since the CEO also claims to stand with the queer community, just… further away then before for “reasons”.

Previous pride events have been neat additions to the game though, like all events, they’re at most vaguely canon. there was one a few years ago that involved in-game representations of a few major queer figures irl like Marsha P. Johnson and Oscar Wilde among others.

And as someone who’s been involved in online communities for a very long time, and involved in moderation/leadership, a critical part of maintaining a healthy community is kicking bigots to the curb immediately and loudly when necessary. there’s the old “Nazi bar” thing everyone says, and it makes the overall vibes absolutely rancid. these guys say they don’t want politics in their video games, and respond by furiously putting their politics in the video game.

Anonymous: Honestly I’m heartbroken especially after the quality of events the last couple of years. Last year specifically I actually cried, it being a story of making someone truly believe in themselves and raising them up.

To cut this year’s content especially after having large portions of it already done is heart breaking. 

The riots have filled me with so much hope and good feelings, seeing so many people be supportive and loving and standing up against what feels like tyranny almost.

OSRS Pride Zine Organizers: Our response to the news that the OSRS Pride seasonal event had been cancelled by upper management was to start organising a digital fanzine of creative fanworks and commentary. Our project goals are to:

1. Showcase fanwork creators from the OSRS LGBTQIA+ community
   
2. Express support for LGBTQIA+ OSRS players and Jagex staff members
   
3. And create a record of thoughts, feelings and actions on the topic of LGBTQIA+ representation and inclusion in the game

We’re aiming to release the zine at the end of August. We hope, of course, that by the time of release Jagex has already issued a statement through official channels and reinstated this year’s Pride event. In the event that they have not, we intend to make the zine’s release a focus for further protest action. For example, hand-delivering a printed copy to Mod North at Jagex’s office.

Our website with the full zine info is here if you would like to learn more. And we are on social media including Bluesky.

UnionizeNow: Many people have asked why we care about an in-game Pride event in a medieval clicking simulator. My answer is this: There are no battles against fascism too small to be worth fighting. The removal of pride is a victory for a wave of violence and hatred sweeping over the whole world. A wave which is going to drown more than just us if it continues. Allowing it any victory, no matter how seemingly irrelevant, without a fight, is a mistake. It won’t stop until it IS stopped, by people, working together against the dark.

I’ll close on a short poem by A.R. Moxon which sums up my thoughts on the issue.

Meet me in the middle," says the unjust man.
I take one step forward. He takes one back.
"Meet me in the middle," says the unjust man

As of publishing, that aforementioned community Pride event organized and hosted by RenderScape has come and gone, a successful gathering of some of Old School RuneScape’s queer and allied players. Admittedly, I was hoping to publish this sooner, but life always finds a way to disrupt. So, I asked him one more time for a little reflection on the event and some final thoughts. 

RenderScape: I would say that the event was a massive success! At peak we had somewhere around 300 players in attendance during the main event, with so many players in one spot that the game couldn’t even show them all at once! The vibe was incredibly positive, so many people just hanging out, making friends and realising that they aren’t alone in this game has been incredibly heart-warming. I’ve received no end of messages from players who attended expressing their gratitude for the event, it’s very humbling to be part of something so big!

And, despite the event being advertised far and wide, including on the hateful platform that is twitter, there were almost no haters turning up to the event! I think I had to mute only about 5 people from stream chat and 3 in game all day, so the “backlash” to Pride is clearly not a big factor!

I think one of the most notable moments for me was when the former jmod, previously known as Mod Wolf, who made the original OSRS Pride event back in 2017, popped in to the stream chat to talk with us for a bit. He was delighted to see the little event he had put together all those years ago still inspiring people to celebrate Pride in game to this day. I was incredibly grateful for his efforts!

I spent a long time denying indelible truths about myself, having to rely on environments that didn’t really allow me to explore who I might have wanted to be. Those little windows into other experiences, seeing queer people, relationships, and narratives in video games, books, movies, whatever, were all steps toward examining the bigger picture of myself until I discovered my own ineffable qualities. There’s no reason for these qualities to be deemed controversial unless you look toward a future where they don’t exist at all. If it wasn’t for things like video games and pro wrestling, where queer narratives are abundant and beautiful, who knows how much longer it would have taken a younger and closeted me to fully understand myself and live in a way that actually made me feel aligned with my own heart in spaces where I belonged.

The protests within RuneScape went on for over a week, players gathering every day to support themselves and each other, buffeted by all kinds of hateful spectacles. These are the kind of stakes involved – it’s never just about RuneScape, or any other space where inclusivity is being sheared away, it’s about challenging these notions of intolerance regardless of where it pops up.

The post We Gay We Pay – The Player Side of Protests for RuneScape Pride appeared first on Gamesline.

Psychotic Bathtub
D: natsha / P: natsha

A snug little unsettling experience from natsha with beautiful visuals and an honest portrayal of mental illness in a cathartic, sometimes funny kind of way. Each choice matters as they guide you to multiple endings; even this short demo had six of its own. These endings, presented simply, represent the kinds of pitfalls going through these kinds of episodes can entail – self-destruction, escapism, derealization, death, you know, fun stuff! The bright and sketchy art style welcomes you to this visceral portrayal, the straightforward narrative of psychosis, with intentionality and complements the subject matter rather than blunting any of the edges. Obviously I’m not a monolith of mental illness and can only speak for my own experiences with it, but Psychotic Bathtub was a soothing, interesting, relatable demo that has made me excited to get my hands on the full version.

inKonbini
D: Nagai Industries / P: Nagai Industries

I know inKonbini is going to consume however many precious days of my life once it comes out. There’s nothing like the reassuring calm of a routine to get me hooked on any game, and inKonbini is promising in that regard. Also, the graphics remind me of Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life; bright and smooth and glowy like a dream. 

The demo is brief, it gives you what I’m assuming right now is one encounter (perhaps one per day or a few per day, can’t yet say) where you take some time to set up the store by righting crooked items and stocking shelves. You have some freedom in what goes where and I would take a guess that there are variables in the full release that nudge you in certain ways, like the weather or whatever. This demo also features a customer: an older man who delights in finding a soda he used to drink as a kid and asks for help finding a special food for his cat, who’s been less cuddly as of late. If you’re not diligent enough during the opening setup, he also remarks upon how weird it is to have bread in the fridge. 

It’s short and sweet, touching upon the deeper connections we can make with other people in the more ordinary moments. Chances are high that the throughline for inKonbini is something like “finding beauty in the mundane” or “the value of appreciating the short time you get with most people.” I will say, I don’t totally agree with the opening premise: “Some might say that a konbini worker’s life is devoid of any color or variety.” I don’t know about that! And neither does Sayaka Murata. Although, I can say that stumbling into a konbini after catching the last train around midnight and being flooded by those fluorescent lights is, though not devoid of color or variety, a little bit of a spirit-draining experience. Regardless, I eagerly await the full release.

Nirvana Noir 
D: Feral Cat Den / P: Fellow Traveller 

Wooooaaah shit this game looks so cool. The visuals are always going to be the first thing you see (haha) but these ones really took a swing at me. There’s light, color, sparkles, and graphical layering that gives everything a unique depth of texture. The writing is also very good, being a mixture of urban mysticism and ancap banter; it’s funny and whimsical. The textbox is an active participant in the delivery of humor, and dialogue comes in different forms. Oh wait hold up, I just noticed it’s a sequel to Genesis Noir, so before I say anything more I have to go play that.

Tiny Bookshop 
D: neoludic games / P: Skystone Games

Cozy games, I finally understand you, because you understand me. There’s nothing I want more than to put little virtual books on a little virtual shelf and help little virtual people make their little virtual purchases. With a customizable cart and side quests, like icing on the cake. Don’t laugh at me when I say if they don’t come out with a Switch port of Tiny Bookshop, I might have to buy a Steam Deck just to play this in the park on a sunny day with a Dr. Pepper just like god intended. 

Compensation Not Guaranteed
D: Team Project Lunch / P: Toge Productions

So far these games are hitting it out of the park with me, but I guess that makes sense. Who am I to deny that another’s carefully curated list of narrative-driven games is exactly what I’m looking for at all times. Compensation Not Guaranteed is yet another Papers, Please style puzzle game, but this time the premise is gentrification, relocation, and the ruthless efficiency of ambitious new governments – under the guise of social welfare, of course. The characters are all animals in an art style that feels a lot like woodcut, with the exaggerated faces and intricate details. 

This demo had just enough packed into it to introduce me to the world and leave me wanting more, showing me the vision of transforming an old neighborhood into a bright and shiny new gray block of infrastructure, by offering its current tenants compensation to surrender their homes and relocate. They have no choice, except to be paid or not to be paid, based on the player’s judgment. With the undercurrent of tension between different species, clearly disparate cultural backgrounds, and looming government interference, I’m curious about how this narrative plays out. The ending of the demo implies a direction I genuinely didn’t see coming, and the overall cheeky tone is promising, but I’m eager to see what angles the devs take with the subject matter. 

No, I’m not a Human
D: Trioskaz / P: CRITICAL REFLEX

This one was a short demo that covered a few days of the game’s day/night cycle (not much to do during the day unless you’ve taken people into your house, so quicker in the beginning) and it’s super promising. The premise is that the sun is going crazy, human-like creatures are emerging from the ground, and everyone more or less sleeps during the day and scavenges at night. You don’t want to be caught alone in your house, but you also can’t just let anyone in. All of the character designs are unnerving enough as to not be obvious who looks off (with a few notable exceptions) and the hints you get about what to look for can be context sensitive as well. No, I’m not a Human is genuinely creepy and unsettling, with thoughtful mechanics and an outside world I want to know more about.   

Very analog horror type shit. Well crafted, well paced, can’t wait to play this in the middle of the day.

A Week in the Life of Asocial Giraffe 
D: Quail Button LLC / P: Quail Button LLC

This one is pretty simple, and I didn’t get too much from the demo. You’re a giraffe trying to avoid social interaction at all costs, almost to an exhaustive degree. If you get caught in the whirling chaos of someone’s small talk, your head explodes. The interesting bit here is the puzzles are aligned with the purpose of avoiding attention from other people, whether that’s distracting them with another person or moving crowds around (cleverly.) It’s safe to say that from the classically ludonarrative angle it actually fits the bill really well, though I don’t know if this one’s for me in terms of a full game experience. It does make me wonder if it has any larger messages about the nature of social anxiety. Obviously, it’s harder to vibe with the premise as someone whose job is emails and can call anyone no problem, but whatever.  

Scrabdackle 
D: jakefriend / P: Fellow Traveller

Just based on the cover, I didn’t know what to expect – it honestly didn’t look like much. And I mean that like how I would describe my first impression of a book, jacket only, the art and assets didn’t inspire anything particularly exciting in me. However, this is my favorite moment to be wrong! And it’s kind of reflective of my entire experience with doing this LudoNarraCon Demo Playthrough, as it gets me out of that bubble of focusing on the games that look interesting to me at first glance. 

Scrabdackle scratches the same part of my brain that 3D Dot Game Heroes did back in the day. Straightforward, kind of cutesy fantasy, with a tile-style map that’s fun to explore. The 8-bit music is bouncy and evocative of old fantasy games, and the sound design is satisfyingly fuzzy. The 2D art is simple but charming, the combat is classic sword-and-magic style, but the writing! It’s quick and witty, and lends a lot of depth to the world. I see that the focus in this game is the story, but it’s nice to see the heart in the rest of it. This is one I don’t want to see fall through the cracks, so I hope it doesn’t. I’ll be playing this when it comes out for sure. 

The Berlin Apartment 
D: btf / P: btf, ByteRockers’ Games

This demo consists of the same apartment in three time periods: a segment in modern times, where it seems you’re renovating the place which has been run down; a segment during the third reich, where you play as an old Jewish man who’s in the process of fleeing to France, reminiscing on his burned-down cinema; and a segment sometime while the Berlin Wall still stood, close to this apartment, as the player tends to a forest of houseplants and exchanges paper plane messages with someone in an apartment on the other side. 

It’s a point-and-click where you play out stories and witness moments during a pretty historically crucial span of time, walking around this apartment connected by memory to a yet unknown end. For example, the demo is mostly spent as the old man, who’s packing up a small suitcase out of a pretty cluttered home, presumably leaving everything else behind. With each piece he picks, and many other objects in the house, he tells a story, or relates a memory, or otherwise describes the significance of it. You can find a camera with a single shot left, take a picture of the home however you see fit, and later find the photo under the floorboards during the modern-times segment. A promise that these different stories come together in more ways down the road. 

It’s bright and beautiful, voiced well, and certain to be an emotional journey.  

We Harvest Shadows
D: David Wehle / P: David Wehle

Another game I may play as long as it’s in the middle of the day. Actually, let me confess, I asked a friend of mine to watch me play through this demo as soon as the scary painting in the living room changed into a screaming ghostly visage. My threshold for horror games is that I’m kind of like a baby and I have a fear of being chased. And let me tell you, the first time I stayed out too close to sunset and heard those footsteps rushing up behind me, I just froze up.  

However! We Harvest Shadows still pulls me in. When it’s not terrifying, it’s actually quite relaxing. The farming sim/open world aspect of it seems pretty fleshed out, and I do kind of want to see what the house and land look like once they’re completely renovated and the player character has made peace with what I can only assume is another dead wife. The environment is beautiful and the music is appropriately serene for a pastoral experience like this. The sound design and visuals are overall very well done, even if they are sometimes used for evil. The relaxing/terrifying contrast here is actually consistent and enjoyable. 

A horror farming sim! See, I told you it was out here somewhere. I’ll probably still play it even though it scares the shit out of me. 

Building Relationships
D: Tan Ant Games, Tanat Boozayaangool / P: Tan Ant Games  

Building Relationships is so goddamn funny. You play as a house on an island looking for love with other sentient dwellings (so far the lighthouse caught my eye the hardest) whose language is familiar without being overblown (i.e. not beating a dead contemporary comedy horse) and the presentation of it all is absurd without being absurd just for the sake of it. 

It’s also gorgeously low-poly, the colors and contrast between models are really bright and sharp, the music is groovy, the writing is excellent – the whole package feels nostalgic and unique at the same time; a rare quality. I want to play more of this so, so bad. 

Schrödinger’s Call 
D: Acrobatic Chirimenjako / P: SHUEISHA GAMES

Schrödinger’s Call is a visual novel in which you play a woman named Mary, who is the last person to speak to souls who cannot move on via a weird phone and a cat who explains to you that the moon crashed into the earth and obliterated everyone on it less than a second ago. I’m pretty sure, at least. 

Through these conversations, you make notes about the details of why each soul can’t move on, their previous lives and relationships, prompting them into varying reactions and helping them recall their memory in order to ultimately save them. In the demo, you talk to a mother who lost contact with her son, desperately trying to reach him the moment the moon hit the earth, and you help to resolve her guilt and aimless yearning. 

In a game like this, where resolution is achieved through rhetoric, I really look for depth in the conversations themselves, whether the resolution comes about in a way that makes sense, but not too easily as to be unrealistic. With this peek, I get a curiosity but I don’t yet have a confidence that it gets nuanced enough. Time will tell, and it’s an interesting enough premise on its own. Also, these gothic-cartoon visuals blend together in surreal little animations, a nice touch for the overall presentation.  

Kill The Clock 
D: Happy Slugs / P: Happy Slugs

I’ll be real with you, I’m not the target audience for visual novels. Kill The Clock is visually interesting and clean, even though the UI feels plain; it looks like something I would have seen ten years ago. The story is a murder mystery that evidently has a time-loop element to it, but I found the writing to be flat, nothing out of the ordinary or worth writing home about. You have stats, which modify dice rolls – the pathways through the story, within which there is a fair bit of player agency. There were some particular mechanics, like scrutinizing a suspected lie or finding the true emotion at the heart of a statement, that show a consideration for the slightly-roleplay narrative of it all. The pacing (and I feel this is where I fail to appropriately review many visual novels) was sluggish, but I gave it just enough playtime to be able to tell you honestly that Kill The Clock isn’t really something I’m interested in, but it may be for you! 

Battle Suit Aces 
D: Trinket Studios / P: Trinket Studios, Outersloth

I’ll put the two I didn’t really like next to each other, how about that? This, as with visual novels, isn’t a genre I seek out too often. Card battler/deckbuilders aren’t really my style, but I do appreciate some of the more RPG elements to Battle Suit Aces (again, this isn’t something I play a lot, I have no idea if that’s generally found amongst other card battlers) like the overmap of the USS Zephyr where you can chat with your crewmates and tend to other Battle Suit needs. 

I feel like maybe Inscryption set the bar too high in my mind. Card battlers are great when there’s a strong story behind it, context around the pieces that make up the deck, some kind of compelling end goal in mind. From what I got with the Battle Suit Aces demo, it gave me the same lack of inspiration that Kill The Clock did, which is to say I don’t see much substance nor engaging writing, but also not enough style to get away with it – yet.  

Usual June 
D: Finji / P: Finji

The visuals here jump out immediately. Smooth, cel-shaded characters and bright environments with high contrast that relate well to what seems to be an urban fantasy/ghostly type of beat. I loved the sound design, from the music to the dialogue, which is that Banjo-Kazooie style mumbling that I adore so much, but with an implacable mixture of languages and other modulating, sometimes robotic touches that give each character a unique sound. 

This demo didn’t dive in too deep. You’re thrown into the classic situation of helping a ghost boy find his way home, which also involves pursuing the man who’s preventing him from leaving, and who presumably killed him. This means going into a portal (obviously) and into a cavernous area full of buggy monsters and otherworldly crystals. That sort of thing. 

It was fun! The story feels supernatural, strange, charming, very high-schooler-saves-the-day kind of vibes. And the combat is quick, easily challenging, but also satisfying. This was a well-rounded demo for a game that looks like it’ll offer something new to the genre. 

Wander Stars 
D: Paper Castle Games / P: Fellow Traveller

This! This!! This!!! I loved this.  

Wander Stars is a turn-based RPG where you play a young fighter tasked with seeking all the pieces of the Wanderstar map – a map whose pieces will always point to one another – and find a long-lost brother. The combat involves a lot of punching and kicking. You can add adjective modifiers to your moves, like you can Kick, but you can also Super Fire Kick, or call in allies using their move words. You can also impress your opponents and get passive modifiers called Pep Ups, like resistance to certain elemental attacks. 

It looks like Dragon Ball and sounds like an anime. You have a buff grandma and become allies with a wolf who’s being pursued by who I can only assume is his edgy yet emotionally conflicted ex-boyfriend. You traverse the world through points on a map, encountering opponents, riches, and other weird little incidents. 

The story is some classic treasure-hunting and friend-making and enemy-redeeming type adventure with obvious inspirations, and the writing is charming and well-crafted. This is the kind of game that has a lot of heart on the sleeve, and it feels like one of those games that people end up making when you tell them to make the kind of game they want to play.  

These were just some of the games featured in this year’s LudoNarraCon, I highly suggest anyone who has stuck with me to this point go check these demos out, plus the many others I didn’t get to. I have particular shout-outs to 1000xRESIST, Interstate 35, Until Then, Death of the Reprobate, and Judero, just to name a few full releases that really deserve the recognition.

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