NB Spiders' estrogen quest went from jam to Rijksakademie
A sharp, quippy quest on what we do for love
The 5 p.m. slot at the Rijksakademie's [untitled games event] this month was a room full of people collectively guiding a slime girlfriend who lives in a sewage pipe toward estrogen. procuring estrogen for your toxic slime girlfriend is NB Spiders' short browser RPG, made for a Halloween scareware jam last year, in which you fight off "creepy skelington dudes," visit a graveyard, and "fullfill the ancient prophecy." It is free, plays in minutes.
What jumped out at me was its wry, short-story humor. It's a simple device twisted from game conventions; a fetch mission for your beloved. But the dialogue sells the small shape.
Spiders led the September 18 playthrough in Amsterdam with game designer BigBeefySharkBaby, then shipped a DX Edition the next day. Spiders is a performer, electronics artist, and game engineer; the artistic associate in the games department at Kunsthochschule Kassel; and their stated research subject is queer forms of play and crip empowerment. The Amsterdam session was the game played the way it wants to be played: together, out loud.
Killscreen covered Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley's free browser release in August; a queer web game canon is assembling in public, a few minutes at a time. This one is worth your lunch break.
The game’s cover art, the wareware editor, a skeleton encounter, and play documentation. Images: NB Spiders, via itch.io.
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