Game: Purrgatory (2021)
Creator: Darvin “Niv” Heo
Platform: itch.io / Steam (Windows, Mac)
Target Audience: Fans of narrative games, visual novels, and LGBTQ+-inclusive storytelling
In 2021’s Purrgatory, you’re not fighting, you’re competing against nobody, and you’re not trying to complete some grand scheme. What you do is talk, wait, and explore. You wake up in the reception of the afterlife—but before you pass on further, you must wait in “purrgatory,” the liminal afterlife, replete with a cast of colorful… anthropomorphic animals? If you’re kind and patient enough, maybe you get to leave with them.
The originally browser-based “visual novel” was created initially for an “I can’t draw” game jam—and it’s that style that gives it such a beautiful flare. Its hand drawn charm and hilariously mundane pun-filled writing makes the game stand out—while following some pretty traditional visual novel mechanics, and also breaking them at the same time. You’re able to explore the extent of the drab hallways, and slowly meet the 7 inhabitants of purrgatory, who each have something to say about one another—and they each have secrets. It’s your job to piece together these secrets through forming meaningful relationships via dialogue paths. Through a feminist lens, that structural design makes a difference.
As Shira Chess puts it in Play Like a Feminist, “feminist play” puts an emphasis on disruption, care and inclusion. Purrgatory, like many single-story visual novels, enacts these three things. The win/lose binary is replaced with a how can I get these characters to the place they’re supposed to be? The in-game progress is built on this relationship development—you are meeting the characters one by one and learning about their stories like Kyungsoon, a transfem hyena hanging in the Commons; Natalie, an aroace moth who draws webcomics; and Sean, a pink snake writing a lo-fi breakup song for a still-living boyfriend. Each of these characters is queer-coded or explicitly LGBTQ+, which isn’t surprising: Purrgatory was created by a queer developer, and it wears its politics proudly. According to Geek Girl Authority, the game features “more gay animals and cat cameos than you can handle,” praising its emotional pacing over traditional gameplay.
This absence of what we might call “teleological drive” is what makes the game interesting—it’s slow, quiet and resistant to grinding. But that doesn’t mean you can’t progress. There’s still puzzles to solve, both narrative social puzzles and also some physically embedded puzzles. At a certain point, you’re meant to just look through the garden for specific objects (won’t spoil it), and all you do is mindfully click around a garden for a while. It’s moments like this that the game turns its lack of challenge into something resonant. It’s not just “cozy,” it’s affective design!
Ethically, it’s subtle—but makes sense. In the game, you can’t leave until everyone is ready to move on, even if one character isn’t ready, you can’t go. That mechanic, I think, is a feminist gesture. It’s a rejection of the traditional hero’s journey in favor of a move towards a shared process of healing. It reminds me of real-world coalition work.
That doesn’t mean Purrgatory is perfect. The emotional labor that drives the game is mostly one-way—you’re the one listening, helping, carrying the weight, and the characters rarely return that care. It’s a common thing in visual novels, but it still leaves the player feeling more like a therapist than a participant. It would’ve been nice to see some of that support go both ways. And while the game does a great job representing queer identity, it mostly sidesteps race, class, and disability. There are little nods—Tori’s corporate coldness, Oliver’s student-loan-core anxiety—but they stay in the background. As Joona Wiik points out in their thesis on gender in games, representation only goes so far if it doesn’t also grapple with the systems underneath it. Still, Purrgatory makes its point quietly and effectively: no one gets out until everyone’s ready. And that, honestly, feels more radical than a big twist or final boss fight ever could.
