Kritiqal Care

Autumn Rain (she/they/it) is a prolific game developer whose work explores religious trauma, non-linear exploration, and getting lost in a maze of rats. We discuss games as miserable piles of secrets, the importance of indie dev communities, and why it’s actually fine and good to troll gamers. You can follow Autumn on Twitter @slitherpunk , on Tumblr @slitherpunk , and play her games on itch . Aut...

Lily Valeen (she/they) is a game designer, writer, and artist who recently released BOSSGAME: The Final Boss is My Heart , a mobile action game about lesbian devil hunters. She joined me on the show to dive into BOSSGAME's development, the frustrating preconceptions around mobile games, and writing queer romance. Later on, we encourage you to befriend your cool mutuals. You can follow Lily on...

Kate Barrett (she/her) is a game developer and comic artist best known for her playful, irreverent, and frequently copyright infringing design philosophy, best showcased by games such as Ready Player Fuck (2017) and Pottergame (2020). She joined me this episode to retrace her curiosity-turned-obsession with Earnest Cline’s novel, evangelize her suitably unorthodox commitment to Blitz3D, and discus...

Content warning: this episode is primarily about porn Kenzie Shores (she/her) is a game developer and artist best known for the pornographic visual novel, Hardcoded. Nearing the game’s full release, Kenzie joined me to chat about Hardcoded’s origins, the challenge of monetizing porn, and why it really sucks to work on the same game for seven years. You can follow Kenzie on Twitter @yoplatz , suppo...

The year has come and gone in a Sonic hued blur, and as is now tradition, I reached out to prior Kritiqal Care guests to ask what their favorite gaming and/or gaming-adjacent memory was in 2022. The responses were truly incredible, spanning great games, communities, moments of personal growth, and surprising opportunities. This continues to be my favorite episode of the year, and I’m so glad to ge...

Dave Hoffman (they/them) is the creator of Mixolumia (davemakes, 2020) , an arcade puzzle game combining contextual soundtracks with diamond-based combos. They came on the show to dig into the spontaneous origins of the game, how it continued to evolve and incorporate player creations, and the difficulty of marketing puzzle games in a streamer attention economy. Later, they admit to having never s...

Cosmo D (he/him) is a game developer and musician whose work explores urban life, the creator economy, and giant pizza demanding buildings. Hot off the release of Betrayal At Club Low (2022), Cosmo D sat down with me to detail his dramatic pivot out of music into games, finding a medium that inspires you to keep growing, and chasing his space trucker sim white whale. You can play Cosmo D’s games o...

Max Miller (they/them) is a composer, writer, and game designer. As part of new studio Pitter-Patter, they released Commonplace (2022), an ordinary adventure game about working in an office. For this episode, Max spent some time talking about the game’s experimental development, how they structured the soundtrack as a companion work, and a desire to make games that push against consumption driven...

Wayward Strand (Ghost Pattern, 2022) is an upcoming adventure game which follows Casey - a teenager and aspiring journalist - as she explores a hospital airship floating above the Australian country-side. Two of its developers, Goldie Bartlett (she/her) and Jason Bakker (he/him), joined me on this episode to dive into the game's origins, how the continuous in-game clock allows for new forms of sto...

Adam Le Doux (he/him) is a game and software developer best known for creating the tiny game engine, Bitsy. Just shy of Bitsy’s six-year birthday, Adam came on the show to talk about Bitsy’s unassuming origins and surprising evolution as part of the tiny games scene. Later, we discuss how Bitsy’s form sets in in opposition to conventional, capital driven games and software, the importance of the e...

Spiders (they/them) are an alt game dev specializing in queer, grimy, anti-tech industry experiments. In this episode, we chat about their upcoming anthology game, The Museum of Radically Obsolete Futures , the tension between wanting to make shit that’s cool vs shit that sells, and how vital communities like The Queer Games Bundle are to the weird game scene. You can find spiders behind you, play...

In collaboration with utopian collective Trust, designer Son La Pham (he/him) and developer Francis Tseng (he/they) created Half Earth Socialism (2022), a browser game companion to Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass’s book of the same name. As part of the game’s launch, Son La and Francis joined me on the show to discuss how the collaboration began, the challenge of building a global planning simul...

Fantasia Malware - comprised of Jira Trello (she/her), Chloê Langford (she/her), and Gabriel Helfenstein (he/him) - are an experimental game label specializing in mega-maximalist un-game performance art. They crowded into KRITIQAL’s digital podcast booth to discuss grotesque beauty, games as instruments, and creating art that can’t be wiki-fied. Later, they recommend birds. You can learn more abou...

Studio Oleomingus is an art practice and game studio based Chala, India, whose work explores magical realism, post-colonial landscapes, and redacted authorship. Studio founder Dhruv Jani (he/him) joined me to talk through his unique history with modern videogames, his skepticism at the necessity of systemic interaction, and how employing fictitious external authors connects Oleomingus’ work to a l...

Joel Jordon (they/them) is the solo game developer of Time Bandit (2022), a real-time anti-capitalist work sim about how our subjective experience of time is shaped by our relationship to labor and historical forces. With Time Bandit’s first part releasing soon, Joel took some time to join me in talking through the game’s themes, how effective games can be as political instruments, and the hazy et...

Karin Malady (any/all pronouns) is a writer, poet, and occultist interested in the relationship between art and audience. Recently, they’ve contributed writing to apocalyptic photography game, Dear Future (Dear Future Production Committee, 2021), and videogame flesh realm DEEP HEEL DOT COM . In this especially free wheeling episode, we talk about growing up on the internet, metafiction, being Tony...

Somehow, we’re at the end of 2021. It has been a strange, unpleasant, unpredictable year, but you know as much already. I won’t belabor the point as if we haven’t all been living with the same uncertainty, but I do want to say thank you for listening/reading/being part of KRITIQAL. The community that has grown around the site, the contributors I’ve been able to commission, and the friend’s I’ve ma...

Breogán Hackett (she/they) is an indie dev, community organizer, and creator of low-res horror anthology, The Haunted PS1. She set aside some time from Halloween spooks to talk about how The Haunted PS1 got started, moving beyond the Playstation, and forcing players to get lost. A likely contender for most games mentioned in an episode, and all good ones at that (a hearty recommendation for Bleaks...

Xalavier Nelson Jr. (he/him) is a prolific videogame writer, producer, and internet poster, working on everything from An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs (Strange Scaffold, 2021) to Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator (Strange Scaffold, upcoming). He took some time away from creating every videogame to walk through how he moved from games criticism to development, the challenge and nece...

Heather Flowers (they/she) is the non-existent creator of EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER , a post-apocalyptic visual-novel beat-em-up about gay disasters meat mechs fighting facists. They didn’t join me on this episode to recap MEATPUNK’s origins as a spontaneous collection of sounds, adapting the series into tabletop form, and rejecting apocalyptic cynicism. I cannot stress this enough: Heather Flower...

Naphtali Faulkner (he/him), AKA Veselekov, is the creator of IGF Grand Prize winning photography game, Umurangi Generation (ORIGAME DIGITAL, 2020). In this extra long episode, Naphtali elaborates on origins of Umurangi , confronting liberal apathy, and the hunger people have for explicitly leftist art. Many detours into Disco Elysium (ZA/UM, 2019) are made along the way. You can play Umurangi Gene...

Jeremy Couillard (he/him) is an artist and professor, whose games JEF (2020) and Fuzz Dungeon (2021) explore the weird, uncomfortable, and inexplicable aspects of life through humor and alien surrealism. In this episode, Jeremy details how he started creating games out of a frustration with animation, the importance of loitering in digital spaces, and finding community in alt games. You can play J...

Rayzones (they/them) and Yaffle (she/they) make up indie studio lowpolis, creators of cute games with surreal insides. In this episode we explore the inspiration for lowpolis’ latest game, co-open (2021), discus the complex politics surrounding “wholesome games,” and appreciate the most fundamental videogame act: crawling through vents. Closing out the show, I once again confess my shame of having...

Ryan Rose Aceae (he/they) is a visual novelist whose games explore the messy, sometimes monstrous dynamics of queer identity through surreal characters and earnest writing. In this episode he recounts his nontraditional route into making queer games, collaborating with Heather Flowers on GENDERWRECKED (2017), and the necessity of complex and challenging queer art. Finally, Ryan ends the show with...

Jeff Chiao (they/them) is an indie game producer, designer, and rhythm game enthusiast currently working on upcoming rhythm action title, UNBEATABLE (D-Cell Games). They took some time away from production to discuss UNBEATABLE’s long pre-production, the importance of embedding composers within the dev process, and the thriving indie rhythm game scene. Then Jeff closes the show with an enthusiasti...