It’s Pride Month, meaning there are gay flags all over the place. This is true for the Nintendo eShop, too, though you may have to look a little more closely to find it. Scroll down for a while in the Featured section, and you’ll see that someone has quietly snuck in a rainbow flag to call attention to games with queer characters and themes on the Nintendo Switch. It’s lovely to see, even if the spotlight is a little shaded by several other banners.
Nintendo’s eShop has a section called Hidden Gems, a regularly occurring list of games someone at Nintendo apparently thinks you should play but might have missed. Right now, though, the games on that list have a little more in common than just being cult favourites or titles that may have flown under the radar. You’ll find stuff like A Normal Lost Phone, Coffee Talk, Gone Home, Life Is Strange: True Colours, and Speed Dating For Ghosts — all games dealing with queerness in some capacity.
All 11 Hidden Gems Are Queer AF
As spotted by YouTuber Chris “Campster” Franklin, this Hidden Gems list of 11 queer games doesn’t mention “Pride” in any capacity and is tucked away at the very bottom of the Featured tab, which is the default window of tiled games and sales lists you see when you open the eShop on the Nintendo Switch.
*squints*
Is Nintendo trying to do a pride sale while explicitly avoiding mentioning pride by name
Or am I just reading too much into this pic.twitter.com/Svqfxv1A6B
— Chris Franklin (@Campster) June 14, 2023
“Is Nintendo trying to do a [Pride] sale while explicitly avoiding mentioning [Pride] by name,” Franklin said. “Or am I just reading too much into this?”
While these Hidden Gems are, well, slyly hidden in the eShop to put it mildly, it’s still cool to see such great queer games getting a little more attention this Pride Month. Take Night In The Woods, an adventure game about a pansexual cat who does crimes with a gay fox and hangs out with other queer anthropomorphic animals. (This one also happens to be a personal fave.) Or the open-world detective game Paradise Killer, which features a bevy of queer and gender-nonconforming folks. Hell, even the cute adventure game Bugsnax normalizes different gender identities by using appropriate pronouns, thus treating gender fluidity as a regular thing.
Kotaku reached out to Nintendo for comment.
Below is the full list of queer Hidden Gems:
- A Normal Lost Phone
- Bugsnax
- Chicory: A Colourful Tale
- Coffee Talk
- Gone Home
- Life Is Strange: True Colours
- My Time At Portia
- Night In The Woods
- Paradise Killer
- Speed Dating For Ghosts
- Steven Universe: Save The Light
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