Have you packed your broomstick, reader? Are you able to study spells, grasp potions, reckon with some unsavoury sides of a beloved kids’s guide sequence, and gorge your self irresponsibly on flavoured beans? Release this week, Pottergame is a splendidly damaged mess of an homage to Hogwarts – a damaged, nostalgic collectathon that’s directly a shovelware joke and a reducing criticism of the Potterverse.
Pottergame doesn’t try and reconcile with the components of Harry Potter that, effectively, haven’t aged notably gracefully. In developer Kate Barrett’s eyes, there’s no separating artwork from the artist. Instead, Pottergame pushes the fiction’s uncomfortable habits entrance and centre. It does this by aping Potter’s personal historical past in videogames – Pottergame is knowingly a chunk of shovelware, a haphazard recreation of Hogwarts the place you’re tasted with one, easy activity: acquire these beans.
This may be very deliberate trash, thoughts. Half the fashions within the game are left untextured, and what textures do exist are sometimes warped or damaged. Harry glides round in t-poses, even throughout the Quidditch minigame (oh, proper, there’s a Quidditch minigame). NPCs unceremoniously clipped by way of partitions, or are left hanging in mid-air. Fellow college students are caricatures – Ron Ralph Weasley can’t get by way of a line with out saying “bloody ‘ell, Harry” – or else totally surreal. A younger witch provides reward to Big Harry’s watchful, caring gaze, clipped part-way by way of a stone wall. Nearby, Neville Longbottom fiercely guards his Bean sanctuary.
JK Rowling is rarely named, after all (referenced solely by her crime fiction pseudonym Robert Galbraith, arch-nemesis of the traditional wizard Jeremy Corbyn), however the game may be very aware of a protracted shadow left behind by each the writer and her work.
Students within the library, certainly one of them seemingly trans herself, will bemoan the college’s new gender-essentialist toilet insurance policies. Knights guard framed drawings of The Ickabog, alluding to a weird second whereby the writer shared a child’s fan-art with a wholly-unrelated caption misgendering a trans lady. A collectable scroll from the fictional Galbraith will insist that house-elves take pleasure in being handled as slaves, really, and any suggestion in any other case is anti-wizard propaganda.
Like many queer of us my age, I grew up with Harry Potter. Some of us nonetheless cherish these books and movies, even because the uglier sides of the work change into more durable to disregard. Here, these uncomfortable moments are unavoidable – ignore them, and also you’re merely left with a shoddy citadel and too many beans. At the tip of the day, Pottergame asks if these beans are well worth the trouble.
Pottergame is accessible without cost over on Glorious Trainwrecks. Now, in the event you’ll excuse me, I have to lie down – these beans did a quantity on my intestine.
