itch.io

It is validating to see a game connect gender dysphoria to that aimless diasporic alienation living in another country. This is a hopeless situation: Thanh’s family may have “escaped the war”, but they remain restless merchants seeking a home. But the salvation that they are promised is either death or co-dependency, a kind of Aquarium Dream where wounds can only be licked.

I just resonate with this game a lot – I am hungry for queer diaspora stories like this. It was awesome reading an earlier version of the script and then seeing how much it had improved too. This is certainly a game that people need to play.

Loved seeing a Decker game on the jam. The concept is really clever.

Excellent interface drama. The story being a brief glimpse into the past is a neat touch.

The atmosphere is stellar. Really good usage of photographic backgrounds and synths. And while I think a lot of LLM stories are overplayed, the usage of virtual(?) pets refreshes the sycophantic dependency on these kinds of narratives.

Really fantastic stuff!

Those are some precious <500 words. An incisive game that uses its short length to make a point: holes of any kinds are fucking annoying.

Great game!

It’s always nice to see a fellow SEAsian discuss what makes their city great. This reminds me of Los Angeles Plays Itself, an essay film reflecting on the ways the city is depicted in Hollywood and ends up championing not the mainstream but the independent artists who understand what it means to live in and a love a multi-ethnic city. Thanks for making it.

A manifesto I can get behind.

Yes, we need to horse around.

It does what it speaks. This was awesome.

Despite already agreeing with the thesis, I found this challenging to read in a good way. I’m on the same “people should take inspiration from my heritage” camp, though this is me being Chinese. But when it comes to Arabic cultures, I find myself writing away from this domain.

And I think it’s a psychological thing. The pop culture impact of Edward Said’s Orientalism and the opticste of appropriation have made me wary of writing about cultures that I’m not a member of.

But it does mean that we’re letting the losers make it without challenge. As you said, we removed the “poison bread” but the baker is still around. And I can’t say I am happy contributing to the cultural homogenization of white people whenever I write a new game scenario and go “I don’t really know how to write anyone who isn’t Chinese or white, so I guess I’ll do these two ethnicities again”.

Reading this manifesto made me rethink my priorities. I’m still admittedly unsure how far I will extend myself, but it is clear that this is becoming a systemic problem for my own writing. Thanks for writing it!

I forgot that the book won awards.

But yeah, I was thinking of spaces like the fanfic communities as I wrote the latter half of the manifesto. I want to remind people that such curators do exist and we should encourage other communities to adopt them.

I sometimes wonder if there should be a Megabundle Review, the same way Public Domain Review has a newsletter where people write about articles about objects from the public domain.

That’s where I got my cover images from!

This is still a sick website. Thanks for linking. I’m always looking for more resources to find new and interesting things.

That could make for a fun thought experiment. Everyone is hunting for the highs that may have never existed.

This was a conclusion I arrived a while ago. I was always an anti-work kinda person, but I realize I was treating my own gamemaking as work too.

I’ve become content with just being chill about what I’m doing. The process is more important.

“Ideology is stored in the balls” is a banger sentence. Thanks for making it.

This is both biting and empowering. It is bizarre for me to hear people flaunt about their opportunities and work and then say, “Woe is me.”

Industrial exceptionalism (which can also be a kind of fatalism similar to heterofatalism) goes beyond the usual self-deprecation I make as part of my ongoing affection for game production. I think that’s just some weird shit or, as you put it, “AAA trauma”. We’re trying to make games and write stories here, not reiterate on DJ Khaled’s hit song, “Suffering From Success”.

And I appreciate the digs at how academia has finally investigated how gamemakers make shit or how journalism is getting a bit loose with BDS. This is fantastic stuff.

Yep, I agree with this.

Played this because of Artgames After Gamergate.

Walking around these spaces with text from Borges and many others, I feel like I’m more a phantom than usual in so-called “walking sims”. Then, when I entered the room with the hateful comments, I feel launched into the abrasive reality I’m in. I felt like I lost that floatiness we sometimes call liminality. I am reminded the world hates queer people.

But when I exited the house, I felt a sense of both relief and loss. Relief that I am outside this housed nightmare that is clearly fake. But also a loss that the words are gone.

It was perhaps poignant that I ended my session looking at the burning blue object, signifying the total loss of knowledge that could have saved many people. The connection between digital cultures in the late 2010s and the sacking of the clinic is so visible here.

It’s a shame that the comment section is going to include my comment and a transphobic comment from seven years ago. More people should play this game. It’s not long, but I’m sure that it will stay with you for a long time.

Having recently finished an article on the Toxic Yuri VN Jam collecting several interviews from different authors a few weeks ago, I thought this was a sobering confirmation of the ambivalence I had.

My cheery optimism about the whole ordeal ended up being tempered by the many different goals and (self-)criticisms people have on the jam, its successors, and their own entries. Everyone, even the people who saw a bright future, had ideas that contradicted each other. Even my own entry, Uranium Gays, is weaved from a different cloth altogether.

I ended up letting the article be a cacophony of different voices, a kind of historical document of this strange, exciting, but ultimately ephemeral moment. I don’t get many “bad vibes” from participating in the jam, but then again there are moments of friction where my own experiences as a Chinese Indonesian clash with the culturally white hegemony. I can only but reflect on instances that can be parsed as microaggression but ignore it for the sake of the success of these communities.

I also now work adjacent to the translated manga industry, which means I have to think about the commercial reception of yuri manga among other genres. It has been interesting to read how fans of yuri manga (both in English and Japanese) interact vs many English yuri visual novels. There’s this tension that may never be resolved because the two creative communities have very different priorities, stemming from race and gender.

As you’ve noted, I think whiteness or at least more broadly the feeling that you belong to the Global North defines the stakes of English-language yuri. The self-flagellation might be stemming from the real failures of the leftist movements in the United States and United Kingdom to solidify trans rights – it’s a fashionable, though understandable for me anyway, form of defeatism. The enlightened liberal values have fallen to the rise of the MAGA right and TERFs of the United Kingdom. I am sympathetic to my Global North comrades in that regard, though my sympathy can only go so far when I live in a fascist country (Indonesia) that has elected a war criminal. Welcome to the club, my American and British friends.

And it’s this mindset that affects even the brightest of thinkers. I once read through A Brief History of Transmisogyny by Jules Gill-Peterson, which has a few elucidating chapters. But as Talia Bhatt points out, it suffers from the romanticism of finding camaraderie in Global South suffering: it’s obvious that the culture Gill-Peterson glorifies is problematic and Bhatt laments, “Oh, save my sisters from the ‘reverence’ of this cursed land and its misbegotten people.”

I think the mass appropriation of yuri manga/anime aesthetics in indie English-language visual novels comes partially from this desire. The isolation many young queer people feel in the Global North is real, but the mistake is seeing Japan as a “lost future” like vaporwave. Without noting the crises in the country that have lately colored how people write yuri fiction there (no gay marriage, extremely weak trans recognition), they adopt the audio-visual languages to depict their own suffering. They don’t know that the genre has so much subversive history since the conception of Class S literature, which is why I think the appropriation feels ignorant to me.

I am perhaps giving more benefit of the doubt than necessary for this leftist Orientalism. My loyal reading audience is probably whiter than I wish, so even my own criticisms of the white queer scenes might not be read as a request to look into yourself. I think that’s why I really like 95 Theses because the game rejects my wishy-washy tendencies to say something so simple: “yeah ngl, this reads kinda self-aggrandizing.”

As such, I am always thinking about my own game dev server and whether it’s actually inclusive at all. I was talking to someone about the differences between my server and others, and they said that my server seems to have gravitated toward “criticism/analysis” than “development/jams”. While I don’t disagree, I think it’s because I have taken a wait-and-see approach. I lag behind other communities’ more proactive approaches to making games because what I want is a robust, diverse community that can talk about pertinent matters like racism. I’m nowhere close to achieving it though: these tensions you brought up and some more might never be resolved.

But like my article, I’d rather let these tensions be transparent for people to see and untangle than to hide it. For every work like 95 Theses and ZATO that comes out, we are bound to see many works and fans are replete with microaggressions. And I think it’s important to give a space for people to bring up “killjoy” criticisms, to use a Sara Ahmed-ism, if we want to see some progress. The fact that you said that “you’ve chosen to die” should not be possible in a space purported to be inclusive.

I still don’t know what kind of visual novel scenario I want to write. I know what pleases many – the aesthetic, the specific version of suffering – but that doesn’t speak to me. Finding works like 95 Theses has given some hope that, yes, I can find something that speaks to me.

What a game. The anger, the fantasy, the feeling the utopian dream won’t ever happen in our lives: it’s all there. I can’t believe y’all went there, and it’s great.

The PC-98 flourishes are very cute. I like the nod to Possessioner, and the shadow puppetry of Utena is done seriously well. It was funny to see the transitions I’ve come to be familiar from playing a lot of PC-98 games.

I also like the yuri ryona take on Utena. It’s pretty sick. Excellent game.

This was bloody fun. True love does exist, especially after foreplay!

As someone who also wrote a long distance relationship story, I connected with this story a lot. Two characters who don’t understand each other, can’t open up, and so on: it makes for some great messy drama.

The way the game explores this particular form of dysphoria is fantastic as well. It’s heartbreaking that even in a LGBTQ+ relationship there’s still barriers that can’t be overcome.

I really like this game. Excited to see more.

This is a potent story about working out one’s complicated feelings toward family and abuse through the safe exercise of playing with dolls. Really impressive work. Might be my favorite of your works so far.

I feel like I just read a literary masterpiece. Never expected to see the usage of doll play to explore the history of a defunct company town: I can almost see a new brand of historiography emerging from this kind of play. I’ve been a fan since I read Ten Metre Tide, but this is on another level and I hope this team keeps surprising me.

I hope my dentist doesn’t read this game. 10/10.

As someone familiar with ukagaka subcultures, I was surprised by how it captured the feel and banter of these “desktop pets”. On top of that, I was pleased to see accurate descriptions of LLMs and neuromorphic computing.

It’s really, really good. I am a huge fan of this game. I can’t wait to recommend this game to others.

Very atmospheric read. I was surprised by how the game “transitioned” to its ending. It’s very good!

The paneling is fantastic. I really liked the relationship between the pilot and the gunship AI.

I’ve been going back and forth on what I think about the Itchio staff. There’s even comments from me about the situation in the professional games media press where I’m sympathetic to the staff, but I’m also just annoyed by the incompetence and how chronically understaffed they’ve been.

At some point, intentions stop mattering. Gross neglect is harmful. As you’ve written, the delisting has caused a lot of damage that cannot be compensated at all. I’m still pissed that Uranium Gays went one from the most popular TYVNJ entry to the bottom; its re-indexing has made it bounce back up, but there’s a part of me that wonders if it could have reached more people.

Reading the zine, I think my opinion on the staff remains sympathetic but only slightly. I’m very, very irritated by the radio silence as well. They haven’t done shit for six months and counting. Volunteers are obviously burned out.

On a related point, they have done more than the bare minimum by geo-locking accounts for UK citizens: it’s one thing to hide the game entry but it’s another for the entire account to be hidden for these people. I don’t understand the rationale to this day when other websites have only hidden the game.

I don’t really know how to talk about Itch without getting emotional because I do care about the site. I know everyone is working hard, but there’s clearly a disproportionate amount of care given to people. It’s reminding me that in the end platforms are platforms: they serve the interests of capital, not us.

This is so lovely.

I think this game has done a great job in exploring how the agencies of women are denied in the patriarchal status quo. The yearning between mother and daughter feels real to me. They find in each other the things they need to keep on living, and I think that’s wonderful.

Great game. It’s so cool to see how much you’ve improved in a short span of time.

That was fun. Loved seeing the CGs and the content warning. I’m impressed by how far the game went, and I hope you make some more.

Bio-mech body horror with trans themes is a good ass combination. This was fun.

Completed all four endings.

I was impressed by how much the game committed to the premise of incel protagonist who really wanted to get some chicks. It was fascinating to see in how much he would do everything he’s learned from Marshall (who needs his own route), even in circumstances like what happens in Ollie’s route. There’s a kind of feeling that he’s walking into hell, disrupting the already established relationships between the girls. He’s just unwanted trash.

And the game doesn’t try to salvage him at all. I was skeeved out, even when he tried to think he’s better than Marshall. The reason these girls are so hostile toward him is very justified. It almost feels like a revenge fantasy for the kinds of bishoujo game heroines who just want these kinds of PUA guys out of their lives.

I also thought the soundtrack was very inspired, with the samples. And the CGs that do exist are fantastic.

I’m surprised this was made in the span of a jam. It’s a very good debut game. I hope you all make more stuff.

Unbelievable. That was crazy good: it’s horrific, erotic, and tragic. The amount of CGs, sound design, and writing just work for what it is.

This was awesome. The ending felt … inevitable in a way I can’t explain.

This game touches on what makes eroguro special: the grotesque turned into a beautiful work of passion and suffering. There are a few scenes that gross me out, but I kept reading because this was about a real relationship.

The final CG is also fantastic.

I also like how you’ve used different galleries for your royalty-free images. The credits roll screen feels like a celebration of what being an indie developer is about. Thanks for making the game.