queens was created for a mini ludum dare (two-day game creation) competition organized by stephen lavelle. increpare’s theme: domestic violence.
in most difficult contemporary jumping games, it’s taken for granted that the player will die and try again many times, most likely taking many incarnations to reach the end of the game. in queens, these lives are characters and the repeating cycle of their deaths and replacement is the narrative, suggesting the expendability of women (who are neither faceless nor nameless) to a henry viii-style patriarch.
though i think i’m obligated to name terry cavanagh’s the best years of my life as my favorite in the competition because it’s a game for two players on the same keyboard. the players’ roles are equal at the outset of the game but become increasingly asymmetrical as the game goes on. in terry’s game, the controls represent control, and how it shifts in an abusive relationship.
for more queens, play amon26’s drag copter.
11 comments
Great stuff. This is the funniest game about domestic violence I’ve played in a while.
If the game had been just one screen longer, I would have become too frustrated with the lack of checkpoints and quit. As it is, I was just short of my breaking point.
I like the ending. It had a nice Portal-like feeling of subverting the mechanics of the game itself.
Oh god, I felt like I was letting these Queens down because I couldn’t get them to safety. I found myself saying stuff in my head like, “Don’t worry, Queen Fortuna! I’ll get you out of here!” and then being really sad when I couldn’t. Then in the end, when I finished the game, I felt like I could only save one of them and still felt sad. :(
I quite enjoyed it as well. I liked that the “Portal-like feeling of subverting the mechanics of the game itself” was pushed to a new level, plot-wise. The only way to “win” one of these relationships is to stop playing, of course, but that is a dangerous process, to say the least.
You just made my day, Bundt. That was exactly the reaction I was hoping to get out of it.
Thanks for the mention. I’m honored to have gotten a post from auntie pixelante!
I liked this lots. I read about it here, and then forgot about it and played it at the LD site, and as soon as that first queen died I was like “Oh yeah, this game!”
It’s pretty interesting, it adds something slightly more desperate to the multiple tries it took me to even cross that first gap. Yeah, I suck. Where did my Mario skillz go?
at first i felt pretty bad about not saving them, then i gradually became desensitized and treated it like any other game. i suppose this says more about me than anything else!
i liked the juxtaposition of the puzzle with the masocore part; i beat it the first time i got to it, but there was still a lingering fear that i could get obliterated at any second.
omg did anna survive D:
I… got frustrated by the lack of checkpoints and quit. At least the lack of checkpoints is thematically necessary. Maybe I’ll try again.
I liked Cavanaugh’s idea, but I don’t think the gender reversal worked for me — I kept thinking, “That’s not how that usually goes.”
I did finish it. The following thumbsucking is not meant as a criticism of a game that was indeed thought-provoking.
Namely: was the lack of checkpoints thematically necessary? The reason most people die a lot in difficult platform games is (I take it) because they can’t actually perform the sequence necessary to win all the way through without messing up. Instead of being squandered to no purpose — from a gameplay standpoint every time you kill a queen you start over — in the typical game you are killing off your lives to serve some goal of yours. It’s like a human wave attack from World War I. Which is even more cruel and manipulative to the characters.
And there’s precedent for this in non-game narratives. What are the elder sisters in fairy tales but extra lives thrown away so that the youngest sister win the game?
which character gains control in terry’s game is based on which player takes the lead early in the game. it can be either.
Ah, thanks for that explanation. Shouldn’t have assumed based on my one playthrough.
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