They save cities. They save cats. They literally change the world.
In honor of International Women’s Day (March 8) and Women’s History Month, we’re celebrating by shining a spotlight on seven mountain-moving, cosmic-horror-confronting, music-making protagonists from the games of just some of the incredible developers we work with.
Let’s go exploring!
Mineko makes herself a home
In Meowza Games’ upcoming Mineko’s Night Market, adventurous young Mineko finds herself in a situation that might be familiar to other young girls—dragged away by her family to a new hometown, and leaving the friends, the school, and everything she knew behind for a whole new, strange experience. In a lot of ways, starting over.
Mineko deals with her new situation with spirit, becoming an explorer, a mischief maker, a cat wrangler, and an entrepreneur, as she gets creative in preparation to wow the villagers of Mt. Fugu Island with her booth at the town’s quirky Saturday-evening Night Market.
“Mineko is more capable than she gives herself credit for, which I think is a relatable trait,” says Meowza co-founder Brandi Kobayashi. ��Along with being a compassionate kid, she has a natural inclination to help others; even in an unfamiliar place such as her new home. She also breaks the rules quite a bit, but always for a good cause.”
Every time Mineko’s fulfills a new friend’s wish, spruces up the struggling museum with a new donation, saves a cat or three, or unravels another layer of the island’s big supernatural mystery, she inspires her friends and neighbors, too—and before long, they’re helping each other revitalize their shared home on Mt. Fugu Island together.
The Meowza team drew inspiration from other developers in their own quest to bring Mineko’s Night Market to life, too. “I’ve been lucky enough in my relatively short game development journey so far to have been connected to so many women in games,” reflects Brandi. “It’s hard to name just one, but someone who I really look up to is Wren Brier, Creative Director of Unpacking. I’m so thankful for her patience, advice, encouragement, and most of all, her friendship. Game development is hard, and supportive women like Wren really make this space a more welcoming environment for everyone.”
Mineko’s Night Market is coming out soon. Wishlist the PC version on Steam, and wishlist the Nintendo Switch version on the eShop.
An unseen protagonist moves on
While you never get a real glimpse at the main character of Witch Beam’s Unpacking while you’re playing, by the end, you know her better than a lot of games’ much more visible leads.
Her life unfolds through a series of moves. New apartments, unseen roommates, unfamiliar locations, and newly acquired (or strangely missing) possessions tell the tale. To players everywhere, no matter who they were, the situations and surroundings felt familiar, and Unpacking has earned accolades—including 23 awards, a pair of BAFTAs among them—for the ways it used fairly simple puzzle-style mechanics to forge a strong connection with people.
“It’s a game where you follow a character through the moves in her life and learn about her,” Witch Beam Creative Director Wren Brier told Eurogamer in an interview last year following their BAFTA win. “One part is that she’s an artist. And one part is that she’s queer. And one part is that she loves plush toys. All of these are elements of the character and not defining characteristics.”
Unpacking is available now. Check it out.
DeLTA proves her potential
“Determined, curious, kind,” says developer Adam Kareem of the star of his upcoming game, Protodroid DeLTA. “An AI with highly advanced reasoning skills. Her biggest motivation is to do the right thing.” Not unlike Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Data, one of his other favorite fictional androids. “But I also wanted to avoid the super common trope of nearly every story involving artificial intelligence where ‘the AI ultimately wants to become human.’ She knows what she is, and is OK with it—and instead just finds humans as fascinating and interesting beings to learn from and interact with.”
In Protodroid DeLTA, you’ll need to draw upon all of the skill and dexterity you developed battling Dr. Wily’s robots in 2D classics like Mega Man to succeed. If she can defend her city against the rising threat of the cybernetic Vypers, DeLTA will earn the citizens’ trust—and show her world the true promise of what AI can become.
Her design features winks to the Mega Man X games Kareem drew inspiration from: in algebra, X is a variable; delta is the symbol for change. DeLTA’s purple suit is a chromatic mash-up of arm-cannon-wearing Mega Man’s blue and sword-wielding Zero’s red. “Probably most importantly,” says Adam, “she’s designed as a Black woman because for decades very, very few games featured Black characters, and even fewer depict Black women as leads. So I wanted to address that issue and introduce the world to DeLTA as another hero to look up to.”
DeLTA is just one of a cast of female characters who play central roles in the game’s hopeful Solarpunk world, alongside Dr. Noor Shelton, DeLTA’s brilliant creator, and AnnDROID, DeLTA’s friend and fellow protodroid with a no-nonsense attitude, high combat abilities, and willingness to do whatever it takes to bring justice.
Adam characterizes his cast as “a deliberate counterbalance to what I’ve seen happen too often in video games. Looking at just the Mega Man games, there’s over 30 games in the series with over 100 characters and yet the number of female characters might be in the single digits. That’s just so wild to me. And often, when women are featured, they’re often relegated to support roles or just the love interest of the protagonist. So, I wanted to create a cast that was in some ways the inverse of that: predominantly women with the central narrative involving women and not revolving around the love interest of a guy. It was important to me that these characters be evaluated and appreciated on the strength of their character design, personality traits, and motivations.”
In creating the cast of DeLTA, Adam drew inspiration from the women in his own life. “Dr. Noor’s design is inspired by my mother and sister, who are Black Muslim women,” says Adam. “Being a renowned roboticist, her last name ‘Shelton’ is inspired by my aunt Paula Shelton, who worked at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (APL) and used to teach STEM and robotics to high school youth.”
Protodroid DeLTA is coming out on April 27, 2023. Wishlist it now on Steam.
Maritte finds herself at school
Secrets hide in every corner of the halls of Ikenfell. That’s the magic school for witches and wizards where Maritte—the lead character in this RPG’s cast of friends and troublemakers—finds herself searching for the institution’s most legendary student: her own big sister Safina.
Maritte has secrets too. Before her quest began, Maritte was one of the “Ordinaries”—regular ol’ non-magic folk. But soon, her visit to Ikenfell unleashes an inferno of power she never knew she had.
Over the course of her journey, Maritte makes friends (and forms a party, of course) with a cast of fellow students, each with distinctive personalities and RPG strengths and weaknesses that can turn the tide in Ikenfell’s unique timing-based tactical battles. Shy, supportive Petronella has a knack for restorative alchemy, and scholarly Rook conjures up curses. Pertisia commands glass and has a tense relationship with Maritte because of her sister; talented Ima is a student and a professor; and Gilda has something to prove as she learns to command the power of lightning.
The story that unfolds is one about sisterhood, friendship, found families, and finding yourself—and ultimately embracing who you can become despite what the world might have told you.
Ikenfell is available now. Learn more about the game here.
Elster pursues a promise
In the bleak science-fiction dystopia of rose-engine’s SIGNALIS, protagonist Elster is haunted by three words: “Remember our promise.”
Elster is a Replika—a humanoid android designed to live among the human populace—on a very personal mission to find her lost partner, Ariane Yeong, who goes missing at the start of the game after their scouting ship crashes on a hostile world.
Without spoiling too much (the story is best left to unfold on its own), the promise between Elster and Ariane forms the heart of the journey, even amid the relentless cosmic-scale horror.
“Personally, we feel a stronger connection to female characters and want to see more of them in games,” the team at rose-engine told us. “So we ended up with an almost completely female cast of characters. We grounded our storytelling in very personal feelings and experiences from our own lives, in a framework of supernatural horror set in a totalitarian, oppressive world.”
SIGNALIS recently won Best Hidden Gem at the New York Game Awards, and is nominated for a GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Video Game. Check it out for yourself here.
Grace follows her Muse
When the Last Muse is murdered, Stray Gods’ Grace finds herself inheriting an incredible godlike power to inspire and persuade through song. Not only is this a life changingly huge deal for a college dropout, it’s also one that makes the Greek Gods living in secret among us pretty suspicious that the murder is Grace’s fault.
That’s enough drama for a lifetime—and definitely enough to land Grace the lead role in Summerfall Studios’ upcoming role-playing musical.
Like the best of modern Broadway, Grace’s story unfolds through song, with the twist being that your choices as Grace guide the lyrics and melodies. If you’re familiar with the games of Stray Gods’ Creative Director David Gaider (the Dragon Age saga), the narrative shares that essential DNA, as you determine whether to charm, negotiate, or strong-arm your way through the challenges Grace faces. Through Grace, you’ll find friends, foes, and maybe even find romance among the game’s potential love interests. Like any great musical, the characters are brought to life through a cast of immense vocal talent; Grace is played by Laura Bailey, who you might recognize from Critical Role, The Last of Us 2, and an incredible resume across games, animated series, television, and film.
In an interview with IGN, Gaider said the game’s biggest theme is of being lost and finding one’s way. “Every part of the story breaks down to someone who has fallen off the path or doesn’t know where they want to go with their life,” he told them. “Devastated in some way, they don’t know how to break out of that pattern. How do you overcome adversity? How do you deal with trauma?”
Grace’s role as a Muse puts her in a unique position to help the gods. “They’re all kind of lost in this modern world and are dealing with issues that they have a hard time getting over,” Gaider told IGN. “So, Grace in this sense becomes a catalyst for them all. I think that’s probably the best way to describe it without spoiling the specifics.”
Stray Gods is currently in development. Wishlist it now on Steam.
Carto changes the world
Carto, the main character of the game that shares her name, will literally move mountains to get back to her family, including the grandmother she holds dear.
In Sunhead Games’ warm-hearted 2020 adventure, players rotate pieces of the world to get around—shifting land masses and creating pathways that weren’t there before, and reconnecting people in the process. But while the “how” of the game was there from the beginning of development, the “why” piece of the puzzle didn’t fall into place right away.
“It was a story of a young girl, alone, who needed to travel across the world for…a reason to be determined,” says Nick Suttner, who joined the Carto team as a writer partway through its development. “We talked about a few story variants, but kept coming back to the idea of trying to reconnect with your family and your grandma.”
For Nick, that idea resonated personally. “I was born in South Africa, and my parents moved us to the U.S. when I was young,” he says, “so I’ve always had the feeling of being far away from my extended family, and don’t get to see them too often. And while I’ve only ever known my grandma—whom we call Granny Rae—as my grandma, she of course had an entire life before becoming a grandmother, full of her own travel and adventure. So I liked the idea of Carto traveling through the same lands that Granny had traveled through when she was younger, sharing some sort of asynchronous adventure together, before eventually reuniting.”
Nick describes Carto as a sweet, curious, capable, and helpful adventurer, “supporting others along the way of her own story.” She’s a silent protagonist, but her actions change people’s lives for the better everywhere she goes.
We asked Nick to tell us about women in his life who’ve shaped his own journey in game development. “My friend Theresa Duringer runs Temple Gates Games, who have worked on both original projects and many excellent digital ports of some of the most beloved board games,” he shared. “She’s been a consistent inspiration in my development journey as long as I’ve known her, even though she may not know it—an incredibly capable dev who founded her own studio, has kept it going successfully for almost a decade, and responsibly balances creative and business needs. They’re now a go-to, world-class studio for digital board games, and she’s managed to do it while still being a good friend to those in her life, and sharing her knowledge with the indie games community along the way as a speaker. Thanks, Theresa!”
Carto is available now. Help her get back to her family here.
