For this week’s Critical Play, I played several of the suggested interactive fictions, including With Those We Love Alive and Depression Quest, but I’m writing about the game that stood out to me most: Queers in Love at the End of the World, an interactive fiction hypertext game by Anna Anthropy. Like Chess argues about feminist games broadly, I would say this game is for anyone curious enough to engage with it openly.
Playing as a feminist means being critically aware while you play: thinking about the game mechanics, the agency they grant you, and what power structures they reflect or resist. It means actively engaging with games as texts with emotional and political meaning rather than consuming them passively. There is also an economic dimension: the games you choose to support monetarily send a message to the industry about what audiences want. Finally, there is a community dimension. Playing as a feminist means constructing new spaces and entry points for other feminist players to discuss and engage with games together, making it a collective cultural project rather than a solo one. I’d like to think writing this post is my small contribution to that.
The most obvious way Queers in Love intertwines feminist theory is by centering a story of queer love, of intimacy and tenderness, that is largely absent from a media landscape obsessed with sensationalism, violence, and heteronormativity. This aligns with what Chess argues good feminist games can do: tell stories that resonate with underrepresented audiences and build empathy. But the game doesn’t stop simply at narrative. Chess also argues that video games can tell feminist stories more effectively than other mediums precisely because of what their mechanics make possible. This is where Queers in Love really shines.
The game’s time pressure mechanic grants the player a level of agency that is simply unavailable in passive forms of storytelling like novels or film. Instead of observing two characters grapple with their last moments together, you are thrust into that perspective yourself, racing against a literal countdown, deciding in real time what to do with your precious last seconds. For me, this actually felt anxiety-inducing. I wanted to click through as many options as possible, to do everything with my lover before the world ended. But, at the same time, I also wanted to slow down and savor each moment. That tension felt so real, even though the choices were constrained and the ending inevitable.
This reflects Chess’s argument that games are “agentic-training tools.” Drawing on feminist theory’s conception of agency as the will to act against systems of power, Chess argues that practicing agency in a game space–even a constrained one–trains players to reckon with power and choice in their real lives. Scholar Sarah Stang would push back here, arguing that agency in games is largely illusory, that players are really only making “false choices.” But I find Chess’s counterargument convincing: false agency mirrors the reality of living under oppressive structures, where your choices are always constrained but still meaningful. This comes through in Queers in Love, because the apocalypse comes no matter what, but what you choose to do with your lover in those last ten seconds still matters.
My one critique is that the game risks echoing the “bury your gays” trope, in which queer characters are disproportionately killed off or made to suffer in order to generate audience sympathy for queer experiences. I found myself wondering whether the same emotional impact could be achieved without the deaths of two queer characters. This game reminded me heavily of Adam Silvera’s novel They Both Die at the End, in which two gay characters spend their last day together after being notified they will die before midnight. Like Queers in Love, death is universal rather than a punishment for queerness, and the characters’ love is centered and celebrated in spite of–not because of–their mortality. I think this distinction matters because the “bury your gays” trope typically functions by using queer death to advance other characters’ stories or to signal that queerness leads to suffering. Neither game nor novel does that. However, I still think it’s worth sitting with the fact that some of the most celebrated queer stories still require demise as their premise (literally from the top of my head: Brokeback Mountain, The Haunting of Hill House, They Both Die at the End, The 100, etc.). I hope to find more media and game experiences that celebrate queer love without anchoring it to death as the condition of its visibility.
Compared to other games in the genre, specifically with the two other games I played this week — With Those We Love Alive and Depression Quest — all three center experiences that mainstream gaming ignores: mental illness, mourning, and queer love. However, Depression Quest uses constrained choice to simulate the weight of depression, and With Those We Love Alive invites slow, ritual based exploration of grief, whereas Queers in Love stands out for how urgent and short-lived the experience is, making it paradoxically the most visceral and memorable of the three.
In conclusion, Queers in Love at the End of the World is a small game but it is quite remarkable what it accomplishes in 10 seconds. It does what Chess argues the best feminist games can do: it tells a story that resonates, it uses its mechanics to generate agency and emotional reckoning, and it invites players into an experience of queer intimacy that is rare and valuable.
