IThe kingdom of Hus is an idyllic rural setting, where happy townspeople wander around the market and young shepherdess Ren tends to her flock while her companion, Tyra, fixes up their hut. It’s almost as if everyone lives in a cozy farming simulator, created by a benevolent game developer. But is that so? Or is it just an illusion created by an evil deity, trapping them in a hideous pixelated facade?
This is the delightfully “meta” setup of Quantum Witch, a pixel art platformer created by solo developer Nikki Jay. Heavily inspired by old LucasArts adventures and the legendary Dizzy series on the ZX Spectrum, it’s a comedy game with a serious autobiographical heart. Jay grew up in a right-wing religious sect based in the North East of England with an incredibly close-minded outlook. “They were obsessed with the end of the world,” she says. “They believed it could happen at any time and that all the evil people would be destroyed: so… had be good. It was extremely oppressive.”
In her teens, Jay came out as a lesbian and was promptly disowned by the group. After a period of homelessness, she learned to code and got a job as a software engineer, but the need to share her experiences haunted her. “The things I’d been through in the past were always on my mind,” she says. “I thought, ‘I have to do something about this. I can’t just sit there with this trauma. ’ I knew there were people who had been through the same thing. I wanted to give them a story to relate to and let them know there are better things out there.”
She initially considered writing a novel, but found the process horrifying. The alternative was video games. In the 1980s, her family owned a ZX Spectrum and she found it an escape. “I took refuge in video games, because I can create the world I want there,” she says. “I became obsessed with computer-generated worlds. When I first played Trashman on the Spectrum, I thought, ‘This is amazing, it’s a completely self-contained, coherent world that I can interact with. ’ I loved it. It took me away from the horrors I was facing in my life.”
In Quantum Witch, Ren discovers that something evil exists beyond the cloyingly cozy pixel art world she’s been living in, and so sets out to uncover the truth. Along the way, she completes fetch quests, collects flowers for her partner, but ultimately has to attack and dethrone God. Though the open-ended Metroidvania-style structure hints at a standard platformer, the game is really a Choose Your Own Adventure-style narrative quest – there are plenty of choices to make over the course of a four-hour game, as well as characters to meet and optional side quests to undertake, all of which affect the outcome. “It’s not a platformer, it’s a game where you have to play through the game and you have to play through the game and overturn the game.” frame former“Jay says. “The choices you make shape the plot. There are multiple endings, and whenever possible, each side quest has multiple endings as well. It’s a real logistical nightmare.”
Throughout the adventure, the story is filled with the wonderfully absurd humour that characterised the ZX Spectrum development scene. In the 20-minute demo Now available on SteamIn the game, you encounter a dancing skeleton who can see through time, a religious group who worship a lampshade (“We’re not a cult!”), and a marketplace where all the merchants resemble famous video game protagonists, including a monosyllabic archaeologist who sells suspicious relics and a strange circular character who tries to sell you stimulants to fight the ghosts in your mind. Unsurprisingly, Jay was also a big fan of the cult Teletext gaming magazine Digitiser, known for its surreal humor. She later became friends with its creator, Paul Rose, who acted as a script consultant on the game. “I had a lot of ideas about story beats and character development in Quantum Witch, but I’d never written anything this long or complex,” Jay explains. “[Rose]was fantastic at helping me organize all that stuff and make it work together.”
After the joy of Thank Goodness You’re Here, it’s a pleasure to find other developers taking inspiration from the eccentric British humour of the 1970s and 1980s. But Quantum Witch isn’t just a pun-filled comedic quest; it’s a multi-layered metaphor for game development, identity and escape, driven by the creator’s own experiences. It’s about what games are supposed to be about: making very important choices that sometimes end up saving your life.
“I wanted to introduce choice and responsibility, which is really the central theme of the story,” Jay says. “A lot of religion is about giving up autonomy to a mystical power that you’ve never seen, heard of, or known about. Throughout the game, Ren regains that autonomy… It’s a story of queer emancipation.”