Apex Legends and Other Browser Gay Games

The popular free-to-play battle royale Apex Legends features a number of queer representations. These characters, including Bloodhound (a non-binary tracker) and Gibraltar (a gay man), highlight the game’s commitment to inclusivity and diversity.

A Gay’s Life, by Harry Huang, is like a gamified field guide to living as a gay person in China. The game’s nuanced depictions of Ling Hao’s emotional inner monologue and coming out to friends and family have been well received by players.
A Gay’s Life

For millions of LGBT people, video games are a way to escape dangerous and frightening realities. But corporations and States yield massive power over what or who is policed in these games, with Google Play banning “sugar daddy” apps and China censoring titles that depict same-sex relationships and characters whose gender goes beyond male and female.

Huang says he created A Gay’s Life to document the current realities faced by gay people in China, including homophobia, family pressure to marry and have children, and sporadic government crackdowns on public events advocating for forms of equal rights. He drew from his own coming-out experiences, anecdotes from LGBT rights groups, and academic literature to craft the game’s 140,000-character script.

The game has attracted nearly a million players since it was released in May, and is now the most popular title on Orange Game Center, which features games made by independent developers. Its visual style and certain interactive mechanisms are inspired by Mountains Games’ hit Florence, and the title has the blessing of that game’s designer, Ken Wong.
Gone Home

Gone Home is one of the first games to fully explore how queer people navigate domestic space. It’s not scary in the ghost-story sense, but it’s a poignant and deeply personal story that has resonated with players. It uses embedded narrative – a form of game storytelling that Henry Jenkins popularized – to let the player’s agency serve the story without undermining it.

The game was created by Fullbright Company, a Portland indie studio that has since made two other critically acclaimed titles: Firewatch and Minerva’s Den. The team’s experience with BioShock and Half-Life informed their approach to the game, which was designed to tell a story through a steady build of set dressing.

It’s a claustrophobic mansion of secrets, and it invites us to sit in a disorientated discomfort with the concept of home. It’s not a perfect game, but it is an important one that helped pave the way for more queer narratives to thrive in the medium of video games.
Apex Legends

Apex Legends is a fast-paced battle royale from the team behind Titanfall and Respawn Entertainment. It’s a well-made game that has set itself apart from many of its competitors in the field of battle royale gaming. This is largely due to its focus on defined characters rather than a generic nobody player.

It also includes a number of queer characters. Gibraltar, the powerful character that uses a shielded fortress to protect others, was revealed to be gay in his official bio. Another character, Bloodhound, is non-binary.

In addition, the team at Respawn has made a conscious effort to make their game accessible to gamers with various abilities and disabilities. Their use of stylized violence and lack of explicit sexual content allows them to appeal to a wider audience while maintaining a high level of gameplay. They have also added text-to-speech comms, an important addition for gamers with difficulty speaking or who are concerned about toxicity.
The Walking Dead: The Final Season

It’s hard to say goodbye to a character after seven years but the writers, artists and voice actors did Clementine proud. The Final Season concludes the story of the woman who put Telltale Games on the map with its focus on emotional choice and storytelling. It was a journey that was brought to a close when the studio shut down midway through development but Skybound Games stepped in to deliver a fitting conclusion with this fourth and final game in the series.

The game takes place a few years after the events of A New Frontier and sees Clementine raise her son AJ while attempting to make a home for themselves at a secluded school. It delves into the thought-provoking question of knowing when to break a cycle and rethink your previous decisions.

Parents: This is a third-person cinematic adventure game with scripted scenes and dialogue choices that can change the narrative. It has a mature rating from the ESRB for Violence, Blood and Gore and Strong Language.