Kritiqal Care
Conversations about games, community, and the reasons we play.
Kritiqal Care is a monthly interview show highlighting the breadth of the games community. Nathalie is joined by tabletop writers, video game designers, pixel artists, streamers, YouTube critics, and others from all corners of the medium to explore games as personal, creative, and political. These are rough times, but games can help us feel less alone through it all.
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Latest Episodes
Meredith Gran (she/her) is a comics artist and game designer, best known for her webcomic, Octopus Pie and the adventure game Perfect Tides. She sat down with me to talk about her experience coming to games from a comics background, how Perfect Tides’ mechanics where influenced by teenage naivety, and why the 00s are such a rich period for coming of age stories. Finally, we wrap up with a teaser for the upcoming sequel, Perfect Tides: Station to Station.
For the first Kritiqal Care bonus episode, returning guests Colin (he/they) of melessthanthree and Kevin Wong (they/them) join me to discuss their recently released action RPG, Death of a Wish. We discuss where the idea for a sequel came from, its themes emerging from contemporary anxieties and apathy, balancing thematic resonance with difficulty, and planning a coordinated marketing push for an effective team of two.
Cecile Richard (they/them) is a graphic designer, writer, and game developer known for their playful Bitsy projects and hypertext fiction. They joined me to discuss cyclical stories, the risk/reward of collaborating with close friends, and how cool underground tunnels are. We also take a moment to proselytize about editors, and I learn about a new, extremely fake sounding sport.
David Su (he/him) is a musician, audio programmer, and game designer who explores interactive music and performance art. He took some time off from his ballooning schedule to discuss how he got interested in making games from an audio background, the challenges and rewards of centering your game around sound, and the playful earnestness of a cloned sheep’s lament. Later, we wander into a video store.
It’s New Year’s Eve, which means 2023 has come and gone, bringing in closing our annual end of the year show. As is tradition, I reached out to past guests of the show to ask what their most impactful gaming memory was from the last 12 months. The responses were as insightful, touching, and playful as ever, running the gamut from industry events, personal milestones, and games that captured people’s imaginations.
Domino Club is a pseudo-anonymous internet collective that makes weird, horny, and genre perverting videogames. In this episode I’m joined by Domino Club card carrying members Emma (she/her), Nat (she/they), and Rose (she/her) to chat about the group’s origins, its unconventional approach to anthology projects, and how all these games are secretly just for them.
Sam Machell (he/him) is half of indie game studio Sand Gardeners, known for provocative and unconventional games like Dark Kitchen, Memphis, Bubbleland, and Brownie Cove Cancelled. We chat about the studio’s origins as a webcomic collaboration, designing hostile environments, and the tragedy and possibility of unarchivable games. Later, Sam gives a brief eulogy for the Wii U, sadly taken from us too soon.
Lili Zone (she/they) is the experimental game designer behind works like Crypt World (2013) and Crypt Underworld (2023). She took some time to chat with me about Crypt World’s origins, the nearly decade long development of Underworld, and what she has planned for the future now the crypts are behind her. We also dig into the evolving conception of indie games, the “small games matter” PR amnesia cycle, and gaming’s ongoing embarrassment and adoration for Great Men™.
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.
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.
Kate Barrett (she/her) is a game developer and comic artist best known for her playful, irreverent, and frequently copyright infringing design philosophy. She joined me this episode to retrace her curiosity-turned-obsession with Earnest Cline’s novel, evangelize her suitably unorthodox commitment to Blitz3D, and discuss the freedom that comes with embracing Glorious Trainwrecks.
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.
Dave Hoffman (they/them) is the creator of Mixolumia, 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.
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.
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 approached writing the soundtrack, and a desire to make games that push against consumption driven mechanics.
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 storytelling, and how collaborating with indigenous and mental health advocacy groups helped the team tell richer, more honest characters.
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.
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 simulator as a browser game, and the importance of going beyond raw calculations to allow players to become emotionally invested.
Fantasia Malware 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.
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 connections Oleomingus’ work to a larger history of post-independence Indian storytellers.
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 ethics of games-as-work.
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 Hawk, and provoking readers.
Breogán Hackett (she/they) is an indie dev, community organizer, and creator 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.
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 creation, the challenge and necessity of figuring out what you enjoy creating, and the existential dark comedy of a drunk puppy.
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 Flowers does not exist and therefore could not have been on this episode.
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.
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.
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 engine’s community, and how to preserve these games against the forces of tech oligarchies.