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.

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.

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.

The post My Modest LudoNarraCon Demo Marathon appeared first on Gamesline.

Away from Home is a rhythm-based pixel RPG. We have high-detail cutscenes and high-detail quick time events that are also played to the beat similar to Rhythm Heaven. For a reference of what the game’s like, think of Undertale, Final Fantasy, or Earthbound, but imagine it’s to a beat.

Long story short, the elevator pitch with the story would be you, the player, enter their world and control the main character against their will. It’s meant to be fourth-wall breaking and kind of meta. 

Let’s go into the story a little bit. 

So, you enter their world, you’re this orb entity, I was thinking an orb is the best way to make something otherworldly because it doesn’t really have a shape or form, it’s just something weird, right? So, you’re an entity that has entered their world and in the prologue you take over Abby, but she’s not actually who you’re supposed to be controlling, it’s supposed to be Michael. What ends up happening is she ends up gaining these powers from this and you end up helping her and feeding her thoughts to her through the dialogue and questioning. A lot of conflict comes out of it, but throughout the prologue, you’re gonna meet a lot of characters that will, in our full release (which takes place years after the prologue), go on to either be villains or start new businesses or start new things with themselves. You see them later on. 

Why rhythm, why this genre? Was it personal preference, background, something else? 

I’ll say this honestly, I’m not even a huge guy for rhythm games, I just love particularly Warioware and Rhythm Heaven Fever, they’re like wacky games that have rhythm.

Was it a challenge to develop rhythm game without having a big background in them? 

Yeah, it was a challenge because different computers have different processing speeds, so we had to program it to kind of like, detect what your RAM’s doing and if there’s lag, it has to auto-correct itself to what positions things should be in. What we did to simplify the entire music programming is we created a program that converts Reaper (which is like FL Studio) files to bars in the game using MIDI. 

A bit like Audiosurf, if you remember that. 

Exactly, but what we have to do is we have to put in the bars into the program, but it just converts it, it’s pretty cool. What we actually did for that is we taught our musicians how to do that, like I did the first few songs, but after we just paid them to go into Reaper and plot the points, send them back to us, and we convert it. 

Tell me a little bit about the music design. 

The music design – I carefully vetted the kind of people who I wanted for this. I got 3 different musicians and they each have a very strong thing that they’re particularly good at. There’s a musician that goes by Chaotrope – very good at guitars, very good at electric kind of music. There’s a musician named Nick Nuwe, who is incredibly good at EDM, and he handles all the battles, right. And then there’s a musician who goes by Zakku, he’s really good at atmospheric, emotional type music and his inspirations are like Porter Robinson and stuff. I gave each musician their own parts of the game that I feel like they fit, so a lot of the hard hitting boss battles will have Nick Nuwe’s music and a lot of emotional moments will have Zakku’s, and a lot of the traveling and atmospheric stuff or hard-core battles will have Chaotrope. 

For such a music-heavy game, did you have these parts of the story already and you found the musicians to fit? 

That’s such a fantastic question, because we made the music before we made the art. I’d give them a description of the characters I had in mind and I’d send them a few pictures, but how the battles play out and all the backgrounds and all the battle scenes and timing, I based it all off the music. I’d get the music first and if there’s like a pause in it, I might take that moment for a character to laugh or I’ll have them pause before doing an attack. I’ll create choreography around their music.

What’s been the biggest challenge? 

Money. So expensive, I’m around $150k in for this game. 

How is it being at PAX, how’s the community reception? 

It has been fantastic, up until this exact moment we have not had the booth not have three people or a line. It absolutely blew up here, we got a lot of really cool offers. 

And what are some next steps? 

Next steps are going to be making some of the fixes that people suggested here, we’re going to make it more colorblind-friendly, we’re going to change some of the colors to match the icons better, we’re going to make the middle part transparent so people can see the bars colliding rather than assume. Those were the main things, we might make it a bit more forgiving too, like as long as it’s touching the center, it’ll work rather than having it straight in the middle. 

For people like myself! 

Right, those are some of the fixes we’ll make based off PAX, and afterwards, I gotta just work really hard for one of my bosses because this is not approved time!

And what are you most proud of? 

Well, truth be told, I’m most proud of my team, like they are honestly – I mean this in a very serious sense – they’re exactly what I wanted them to be, they are so perfect at everything they do and how they do it. They’re so reliable, not a single time have I been let down by them. 

What does the team look like? 

A marketer, a programmer, me, and a few part-timers.

Sometimes that’s all you need! What about the art direction? 

So, the art direction, it’s kind of hard to pinpoint what exactly inspired me because there’s a lot of different things, but I would give it to three particular things: I realized I needed better graphics after I played Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story, that made me realize RPGs can have really good pixel art. And then I really like Undertale for the vibe and atmospheric emotional parts to it. I love the darkness of LISA: The Painful. So, I thought I’d wrangle all three into that art style. And the outcome is this!

What about your background in game development? 

I played Undertale when I was a 5th grader and before that I was really into robots and I’d buy those little robot kits and stuff. I loved the idea that you could create life, in a sense, like you could make things move and come to life. And then I played Undertale, and luckily enough back-to-back played LISA: The Painful, which are two of, in my opinion, the best RPGs. And for the 5th grader, who doesn’t have a grasp on that stuff, it blew my mind, and on top of that, I didn’t even know that indie dev was a thing. I thought that only big companies could make games, I didn’t know that a single individual could do that. So when I found out that I could do that, I ended up loving game development for the same reason I loved robotics – now instead of making a little life in front of me, I could make an entire world on a screen. I made a lot of not-very-good RPG Maker games and stuff that I never released or anything. And I slowly got better and better, and then when I was in my freshman year of high school, I came up with Away from Home and I started working on it. I restarted it eight different times because I kept getting better at art, better at programming, and better at all that stuff, and just realized it needed to be restarted. 

You’re thinking “well now I’ve improved, but I don’t want to leave this one behind.” 

Yes, what I learned is – and I will say this as my biggest piece of advice to any game dev – don’t start with your biggest project first, because you’re gonna get better at programming and art and all that stuff, and because of that you’re gonna keep restarting the same game, when you could be making a ton of small games and showing your improvements in those small games until you think you’ve reached your peak.

Wishlist Away From Home on Steam (there’s also a demo available) and find them on X, Bluesky, and Instagram, just to name a few. You can find more information, relevant links, and announcements on their website and also join their Discord!

The post Conversation with Cameron Smith-Randick of Away From Home appeared first on Gamesline.

What was the biggest challenge in making this game?

The biggest challenge is legal. We’re operating in extremely nuanced and complicated areas of the law, so we’ve got a great legal team helping us navigate what we can and can’t do. That is an enormous part of our budget, I would really not recommend people do anything but create their own stuff to be honest.

Were any of the characters you’ve got now in a legal gray area? 

Well, it’s interesting, one of the ways that we’ve arrived where we have with the character Screamshaver came from an iteration where it was Sherlock Holmes. At the time, a few years ago, there were Sherlock Holmes stories that were in the public domain but some were not. The Conan Doyle estate was arguing and winning on the premise that you can’t have Sherlock Holmes show human emotions because that only happened later. He has to be an unfeeling robot, so to speak, and I said ‘bet, he’s a robot.’

Ultimately we found Sweeney Todd to be a better fit on the concept. He’s an electric razor, a sort of demon barber pole—and by now those later Holmes stories have joined the public domain anyway.  So Sweeney Todd became the robot.. 

I didn’t even know Sweeney Todd was in the public domain. 

Yeah, Sweeney Todd is a penny dreadful character from the mid-1800s. 

And what are some of your inspirations? 

Other than the source material? Smash Bros., and I guess to be more specific to myself, I was a big Wikipedia kid growing up, so I would just go down every rabbit hole I could about, like, Ben 10 and Pokémon, so I kind of want to create that experience for people in the modern age. I want to be able to give kids a rabbit hole to go down about Sweeney Todd, Mother Goose, Lilith, rather than the trophy section of Smash Bros., where I spent a lot of my time. That feature hasn’t appeared in Smash for nearly a decade, so it’s really been fun trying to think of how to pass that experience on to the next generation of players. 

Is there any specific process with deciding how you’re going to put a twist on these old characters, other than the most natural evolution, like Sweeney Todd as an electric razor? 

It’s sort of about making a diverse cast of characters. Needless to say there are a ton I’m working on that are not here at PAX and they are not public information, but I look at the whole of the picture and I say “oh this guy’s a little too close to this guy, maybe do we combine them or do we separate them out and make them even more different?” 

Lilith, for example, you’ll notice that her hair and her grass skirt are like one-to-one the original Peter Pan illustrations. She’s also combined with the plant Audrey from The Little Shop of Horrors, which, in the 60s, they thought “no one’s going to like this movie” and they just never bothered to copyright it. So the original black and white Little Shop is part of this character. I thought, “what’s the natural extension of the fruit growing and budding into a new creature?” Oh, it evolves mobility and this sort of predatory process of evolution by becoming a full human-type creature with arms and legs, and her toes can grow into plant roots for one of her attacks, and the leaf at the end of her braid is a hungry venus flytrap mouth. So it’s really wacky when you lay the whole process out, but the end result is surprisingly simple: it’s a plant girl… that’s it!

When you have to focus in and get something done, especially creatively like this, is there certain music or a certain playlist you put on?

There are some YouTube compilations called like, “classical music that goes hard,” stuff like that. 

I’ve heard like, the lo-fi beats, hip hop, classical. I put on the Succession score. 

Yeah, I try to avoid anything more recent than a hundred years old when I’m working, because I don’t want to accidentally get inspired by something that I shouldn’t be. 

How’s your experience been at PAX? 

Incredible. You know it’s kind of tough to thread the needle between the casual audience and the fighting game audience. There are a lot of kids who will just take to these cartoon characters, not even knowing who they are in the first place. And there are a lot of people who recognize the names that we’re using but don’t really play fighting games. So it has to skew a little broader than something with a highly technical component.

The way that we thread that needle is by simplifying the attack commands. We have light, strong, and special attacks that work on the ground and in mid-air, and that makes a total of six attack options. Very easy to follow if you don’t know these types of games. At the same time, we’re fighting game fans ourselves, and we chose to maintain the fast pace, the high technical elements like wavedashing and tech-chasing that make some of the games in the genre really fun. In fact we’re canonizing these things by giving them fun animations and simplifying them down to two-button commands. They’re easier to use than ever, and it’s been really rewarding to see that actually pay off. Fighting game players love it, and people who have never picked up a controller love it. It’s been really incredible to watch. 

What’s next? 

More fighters! 

You get home after PAX and it’s like, back to the drawing board.

We have a pretty good idea of who’s coming next. 

Any final thoughts? 

I would encourage you to please go check out our social channels. That’s @royaltyfreeforall on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. On X and BlueSky, it’s @royaltyfree4all with the 4 because otherwise we exceed the character limit. 

You can also check out AAAA Games and Royalty Free-For-All on their website and Steam. There’s an upcoming Discord server and a Kickstarter planned for later this summer, so keep an eye on the Royalty Free-For-All socials for more information!

The post Conversation with Colin McIsaac of Royalty Free-For-All appeared first on Gamesline.

Atmospheric really is the right word for it. I was getting so immersed in it, I’m like in my old family home basement again, like fifth grade on the computer logging onto Neopets. What was the inspiration, why this format, to tell this story? 

We really believe that there’s something that is so naturally creepy and unsettling about messing with other peoples’ desktops. The basic premise of the game is that your uncle started suffering from dementia and losing his memories, and he reaches out to you to help him find a missing girl, believing that the answer is within his old computer, but he cannot remember why. It’s funny because you’re getting into the profile of somebody really close to you, and somebody that you hold dearly to you, and just start messing with old cache websites, old journal entries, figuring out like “oh maybe I didn’t know this person as I thought I had.” 

There are three users in the full game and each one of these users is a different person. Just picking one, the first user is your uncle – an old man – so everything is more, you know, he has a way of describing himself and describing his thoughts through the journal system. 

The second user, she’s a teenager, so even the music changes a little bit based on your user. She’s an artist, so you know, her desktop is more messy. 

So, it is a lot about, you know, we have mechanisms for storytelling, like a journal system where you can get all the pieces of the story, but there’s this other side where it’s more immersive storytelling where you’re actually getting to know somebody just by looking at their desktop. 

I found myself, you know, while I was trying to solve the puzzle, I was tempted, and able, to try every possible idea that popped into my head. Just from the brief look, it seems to go very deep. 

How long has it been in development? 

We’ve been working on it for a little more than a year now and we’re expected to release it, the date that we’re telling ourselves is Q1 of 2026, but we’re still in discussion with publishers and kind of settling that situation, so we don’t have a concrete date, but aiming to release around that time. 

In the process of developing this, because this is such a faithful recreation just from my own personal experience, did you have to do any specific research or was it pulled totally from your memories of old Windows OS? Were you like looking at old screenshots, going on the wayback machine? 

We had to do a bunch of research. Like, one of our friends still has like an old computer with Windows 98, that helped a lot, especially to get the specific game feel, you have the whole nostalgia trip there and I think one of the biggest challenges is the game design, because we want it to feel like a simulation, like you’re actually in the OS, but then it would go through the simulation route. Like, maybe a user wants to delete all the files, which is something that is possible, so we have to build the safeguards for us so it’s still a possible game moment. You know, enable enough freedom for people to explore at their leisure, but at the same time it is a game so there are some safeguards to avoid locking yourself out.

I imagine that there are some significant contingencies in there if you really want to mess it up.

We manage everything as if it were a permission system, so when you start you don’t have permission to do anything at all, once you keep going and unlocking other users you get more admin permissions, so to speak, and you’re able to do whatever you want with the files. We have a system called the daemon system, it’s hard to showcase in the demo, I know you saw a little bit of it, but basically we’re tracking like hundreds of metrics about what you’re doing. So how many tabs you have open, do you take notes within the notes, do you stop the music to solve the puzzles – we get all the data and we’re trying to create a psychological profile about you and tailor the experience based on that. 

With that, I think we get a lot of info and really good data just through playtesting, even here at PAX. There are some puzzles that we’re showing to the public for the first time, and so just seeing how people solve these puzzles in many different ways, it’s like “oh I didn’t even know as the developer that you could do that.” That’s fascinating to me, and just gives us more ideas on how to react, or track people’s behavior, their interactions with the game. 

And what are you most proud of?

Definitely the game feel of it. We’re really proud, as you can see we brought our own CRT and there’s an OS version of the game that doesn’t have any of the puzzles. Like people have been coming to our booth, drawing and sketching for the whole four days and we have like hundreds of drawings now and it’s amazing, some people are really creative. I think the thing I feel the most proud of is making something that people are engaging with and that’s resonating with people. It hits you with a unique sense of nostalgia, just with how much it really does look and feel, and even sound like an old system. 

When you are trying to lock in and get a lot of work done, is there any specific music that you like to play or any specific playlists that you turn on to really focus in? 

Yeah, I feel like probably the playlist I hear the most while working is hip hop, MF DOOM, something that is not as lyrical like something that’s background noise, upbeat enough that it keeps me going, I feel like that is really good for me. 

Do you have any final thoughts, anything you want everyone to know that I haven’t touched on? 

We have this demo that we built for PAX, but we have another demo that’s on Steam, it’s a longer version. We wanted to be mindful of everybody’s time, so this demo lasts like 20 minutes or so, the one that’s on Steam is like 40 minutes to 1 hour depending on how good you are at solving the puzzles. So yeah, if people want to check that out, it’s amazing. 

And how has the experience at PAX been? Like the community reception, what’s some valuable feedback that you’ve gotten, or anything like that? 

People are great. This is the first time that the team has come here as exhibitors, we usually come to PAX as attendees, and we know that it’s packed, there’s a lot of people, but I feel like we’ve had a lot of attention, people have come and given us encouraging words, and that’s always exciting. We actually have an ARG that’s going on. Our designer made that specifically really hard. We came to PAX with the idea that nobody was going to be able to solve it. 

Has anybody? 

Eight people have solved it already. On the first day there were people who were solving it, so we were stoked. So, we really feel like this is our community.

You can also find Recurring Dream and Desktop Explorer on X, Bluesky, and Instagram, check them out on itch.io and their website, and join their Discord!

The post Conversation with Carlos Gallegos of Desktop Explorer appeared first on Gamesline.

And it’s really the graphical design of it that struck me the most, it looks like that specific era of RPGs, like you mentioned Bethesda-style RPG, was this an intentional reflection of that era or had it anything to do with technical limitations? 

The style grew also out of – there’s a number of game developers using this style now. When I first started out I was very involved with the Haunted PS1 group and what I and all of these other creators have in common is that we love the style of early PS1 and PC games partly because not only is it nostalgic, but putting these limitations often fosters new creative ideas. 

And also, by breaking down the game into more chunky, cohesive elements, I think it really highlights what’s interactive in the world. So many games these days have this pseudo-realistic aesthetic but there’s a disconnect between the realism that you see and the limited interactions that you can make in the space. Whereas what I love about this style is that it’s immediately obvious, with a low-poly game, what you can interact with, where you can go, and what you can do. There’s a kind of simplicity and honesty to the low-poly style that I think works pretty well with the game mechanics.  

I feel like with maybe the tools game devs have to use nowadays, it might be easier to make something that’s overly-polished rather than low poly, were there any distinct challenges with making Dread Delusion in this style? 

I would say low poly is definitely easier, that is another draw to it, it’s easier to make low poly assets and you can iterate quite quickly. With level design, I can create all these levels quickly and I never need to go back and add all these realistic aspects, like I can just keep the first draft and then change that quite easily, iterate and change, based on feedback and playtesting. It’s easy to build on your level designs while keeping that finished low poly style. So, I’ll say that low poly is really nice to work with. It’s not easy, I guess, me and the team of Dread Delusion have been working on it so long that we’re used to it but there’s definitely a high skill involved, but there’s less time involved. 

I also noticed that a bulk of the narrative, at least from my time with it, seemed scattered across the world alongside that central storyline, a lot of it you discover in these places for the player to find and explore, and the world itself holds your hand very little. How do you feel the practice of discovery and this kind of self-sufficient playstyle serves the player and the type of story you’re telling? 

I was always inspired by Bethesda-style open world games where the player’s let loose to wander as they see fit. I would never play the main quests of those kinds of games, I always loved just finding my own stories. So that was the main thing, I wanted it to stand on its own as a game where you can explore and find interesting side quests before we had this really strong story. 

Actually, we had so much fun crafting the main narrative that I think although most of the game is optional, I hope that we did a good job with making the main quest interesting enough so that once you finally kind of return to the main quest, and once you decide to chase down Vela, I think that we did a really good job on that. But, it was always meant to have a strong sense of freedom and every nook and cranny we wanted to reward players with an interesting conundrum or a thought-provoking bit of lore. We really wanted to enrich the player with an interesting world. 

There are so many little secrets in Dread Delusion and so much of it ties to these side stories that it really is very rewarding. Did you get any specific feedback about that storytelling style from the community while it was in early access or what piece of feedback was most valuable? 

The early access was hugely valuable for so many reasons, but actually getting the game into player’s hands and hearing that feedback – a huge amount of the game changed based on player reactions, it really was invaluable. From small things like tweaking the stamina system to be more forgiving to larger things, like in early access originally a lot of the puzzles were more simple, and a lot of the player feedback was they needed more engaging puzzles and deeper level design, so we doubled down on that and really tried to give players what they were asking for. So, I think the feedback from early access hugely improved how the game ended up. It was definitely a challenge having to iterate and release updates for an audience, but I think it was well worth it and shows in the final game. 

Were there any, other than as previously mentioned Bethesda-style RPGs, were there any other specific inspirations behind Dread Delusion?

Although the game is very inspired by obviously Morrowind and the like, it’s also equally inspired by something like Zelda, where actually these RPG ideas are condensed down to these simple engaging forms. And something like Dark Souls, where there are times when the level design closes up and becomes a bit more labyrinthian. 

But also I love reading old 70s science fiction and fantasy novels and these kind of strange forgotten pulpy stories. 

It feels very pulpy in a good way. You take something like a goblin and I know what a goblin looks like but you’re like “it actually looks like this” and it’s not any kind of goblin I’ve ever seen before and I’m totally there with you. 

Yes, right. 

And a random question: When you have to lock in or you’re under a personal crunch, is there any sort of music you like to throw on or a specific playlist?

Actually, I’m a big fan of lots of music, I’ve got like 70 favorite artists I listen to and try to keep up with new releases. A lot of my friends are big into music and we go to a lot of gigs, but actually when making the game, honestly, I would just stick on YouTube chill beats, the most unobtrusive music. 

Lo-fi beats to game dev to. 

Yeah, there are certain kinds of playlists of lo-fi beats that I’ve listened to for thousands of hours because I’m really kind of bad about being distracted, and if I put on my favorite music I’d probably find it really difficult to code. 

Do you have any final thoughts or anything that you want people to know?

Just that we’re so pleased and humbled by the response of the community since launch and we’re so grateful for everyone who bought the game and showed their support.

The post Conversation with James Wragg of Dread Delusion appeared first on Gamesline.