nex3:
Quing’s Quest VII: The Death of Videogames manages to feel like a classic point-and-click adventure game despite having almost nothing mechanically in common with one. This comes in part from the low-res graphics and the various references to Monkey Island and King’s Quest, both obvious and subtle, woven throughout the game, but most of it is just the timbre of the writing: it perfectly captures the precise combination of high-stakes grandiosity and goofy humor that characterizes the best of the 80s- and 90s-era adventures. Quing’s Quest achieves its goal of emulating the elders of video games—a goal explicitly laid out in the game itself—marvelously.
It goes beyond just emulation, though. Built on top of the homages to the past, the great writing, and the well-chosen music and sound effects, there’s a touching allegory (if that term even applies when the parallels are so obvious) for the plight of video games and the misogynists who beset them. It’s less a story about the current state of games as an art form and industry—that’s taken as read—than it is a story about the way that state affects the people involved. The narrator stands in for everyone who’s been pushed out and alienated by the misogyny, racism, and queerphobia of games, and the story focuses on their sense of love lost and beauty destroyed.
Someone wrote something nice about a thing I made <3
