Sometimes you’re playing a game and the gears start turning on themes and allegory and you start thinking about things like wholesome discourse and the responsibility queer people are pressured to have when talking about themselves and their communities and how that sucks and you hate it and then you think about the couple of weeks where there was a flyer in the lobby of your apartment building letting everyone know that a couple of trans people in the neighborhood had been assaulted by a guy who had just gotten out of prison for targeting and beating trans people in particular and how you don’t pass at all and how your assigned parking space is literally the furthest one from the building and sometimes you just want to play a game by someone who gets you featuring people who get you hanging out and being cool and maybe that’s fine once in a while? I don’t know.

I think npckc has been somewhat unfairly defined as a creator who makes games that are treacly and unchallenging when their most famous work, the year of springs trilogy, I think strives to be educational and affirming without shying away from stresses and difficulties and hardships that go along with various aspects of queerness and allyship. I think the things that makes this maybe hard to identify are that exactly how much of the toughest stuff in those games you see is up to you the player via choices, and that they DO focus on positivity and affirmation over tragedy, melodrama, and the more brutal realities a lot of queer people do live. Which is cool with me! I think there’s room for this. There’s gotta be a line between criticizing games that infantilize us and try to iron out everything that is scary and abnormal and challenging to the hegemony about queerness and ones that just like, don’t want to be bummers all the time, and I think these games generally err closer to the latter camp than the former.

I don’t PARTICULARLY want to organize my thoughts and make this a whole thing because I find wholesome discourse generally annoying so I’m gonna cut myself off before I start really thinking about this and feel the need to reorganize the earlier paragraphs (EDITING IS FOR NERDS), just recommend everybody read Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity by José Muñoz and leave it at that haha.

Tomato Clinic certainly leans MORE in the direction of cutesy edutainment than other works by this creator, but I think it’s a testament to kc’s skill as a writer that the allegory works as well as it does. In a very brief window of time they create a couple of really well-sketched characters, a fun spin on commonly found urban fantasy tropes, and juuuuust enough depth in both to impress me considering the whole thing is over in twenty minutes. I would do anything Marie told me to. I want her and I want to be her, mission accomplished, and Gakuto is my friend. I will come back to the Tomato Clinic and hang out with these guys. They are cute, and they are sweet. The whole game is. I like it!

lol I should have listened to AlexaLily

idk what tone she meant by her comment but for me the ending sequence quickly went from an appreciative dread to surely unintentional laughter

neat until then tho!!