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Pottergame’s wizarding world is bizarre, glitchy and deeply criticalDid you reach the bonus bean room?
Did you reach the bonus bean room?
Have you packed your broomstick, reader? Are you ready to learn spells, master potions, reckon with some unsavoury facets of a beloved children’s book series, and gorge yourself irresponsibly on flavoured beans? Release this week,Pottergameis a wonderfully broken mess of an homage to Hogwarts - a broken, nostalgic collectathon that’s at once a shovelware joke and a cutting criticism of the Potterverse.
Students in the library, one of them seemingly trans herself, will bemoan the school’s new gender-essentialist bathroom policies. Knights guard framed drawings of The Ickabog, alluding to a bizarre moment wherein the authorshared a child’s fan-art with a wholly-unrelated captionmisgendering a trans woman. A collectable scroll from the fictional Galbraith will insist that house-elves enjoy being treated as slaves, actually, and any suggestion otherwise is anti-wizard propaganda.
Like many queer folks my age, I grew up with Harry Potter. Some of us still cherish those books and films, even as the uglier sides of the work become harder to ignore. Here, those uncomfortable moments are unavoidable - ignore them, and you’re simply left with a shoddy castle and too many beans. At the end of the day, Pottergame asks if those beans are worth the hassle.
Pottergame is available for free over onGlorious Trainwrecks. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to lie down - those beans did a number on my gut.
