Xalavier Nelson Jr has a bit of a love hate relationship with screens right now. As development on his studio’s gutsy market game Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator was wrapping up at the end of last year, he tells me he remembers “just being really angry at the concept of the borders of the screen”. He was, by his own admission, in “a vague fugue state” at the time, having spent months immersed in Space Warlord’s black and green trading interfaces. But the feeling of having his game “chained to these walls” at the edge of his monitor proved to be a surprisingly powerful one - so much so that it spurred Nelson Jr and his team at Strange Scaffold to create an entirely new kind of game in the months leading up to Warlord’s release: Witch Strandings.
That's right. Taking cues from Hideo Kojima’s hiking postal sim Death Stranding, Witch Strandings is a game that not only asks what Sam Bridges’ cross-country cargo routes might look like if they were made with a fraction of Kojima’s development budget, but also how games can create experiences that are “larger than my screen,” says Nelson Jr. And the answer, it turns out, lies in your PC’s humble mouse.