It’s Pride Month, which means there are gay flags everywhere. This also applies to the Nintendo eShop, although you might have to look a little closer to find it. In the Featured section, scroll down for a while and you’ll see that someone has quietly snuck in a rainbow flag to draw attention to games with queer characters and themes on the Nintendo Switch. It’s nice to look at, even if the spotlight is somewhat overshadowed by several other banners.
Nintendo’s eShop has a section called Hidden Gems, a regular list of games that someone at Nintendo seems to think should be played but may have missed. For now, though, the games on this list have a little more in common than just being cult favorites or titles that may have flown under the radar. You will find things like A normal lost phone, coffee talk, Went home, Life is Strange: True ColorsAnd Speed dating for ghosts– all games that deal with queerness in any way.
All 11 Hidden Gems are Queer AF
As discovered by YouTuber Chris “Campster” Franklin, this Hidden Gems list of 11 queer games makes no mention of “Pride” and is tucked at the very bottom of the Featured tab, the default window for tiled games and sell lists you see when You open the eShop on the Nintendo Switch.
“Is Nintendo trying?” [Pride] Sale with express waiver of naming [Pride] by name,” Franklin said. “Or am I just reading too much into it?”
While these hidden gems are secretly tucked away in the eShop to say the least, it’s still cool to see such awesome queer games getting a little more attention this Pride Month. Take night in the forest, an adventure game about a pansexual cat who commits crimes with a gay fox and hangs out with other queer anthropomorphic animals. (This one also happens to be a personal favorite.) Or the open-world detective game Paradise Killer, in which there is a bevy of queer and gender non-conforming people. Heck, even the cute adventure game Bugsnax normalizes different gender identities by using appropriate pronouns, thus treating gender fluctuation as something normal.
my city Contacted Nintendo for comment.
Below is the full list of queer hidden gems:
- A normal lost phone
- Bugsnax
- Chicory: A colorful story
- coffee talk
- Went home
- Life is Strange: True Colors
- My time in Portia
- night in the forest
- Paradise Killer
- Speed dating for ghosts
- Steven Universe: Save the Light
