Story

You might not have heard of Quantum Witch, but if you’ve an affinity for pixel-art platformers with engaging story-beats, meta-narratives, and an array of kooky characters, then you should be all over it. To just call Quantum Witch a colourful platformer with a strong narrative (read: ‘plotformer’) is to do it a disservice, though.

Quantum Witch is so much more than its vibrant pixels; it is NikkiJay’s personal story of fleeing a religious cult, embracing her LGBTQ+ identity, and seeking solace in video games. There’s a dark undercurrent, but ultimately, Nikki chooses to tell her story – and a story that many others will no doubt see themselves in – with humour and pride.

To get a better idea of exactly what informed Quantum Witch and how the indie ‘plotformer’ came together, VG247 sat down with NikkiJay to ask how growing up in a religious cult led to the development of the game and what she hopes audiences will get from it.

The below interview discusses religious trauma, coercive control, and the abuse of power.

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VG247: I’m aware that Quantum Witch is largely informed by your own personal experiences of fleeing a religious cult; would you mind sharing some more about your experience, and how it has informed Quantum Witch’s story and characters?

Nikki: I was born into the group and my family on both sides were third generation. Age 10, I needed my tonsils out and I had to tell the surgeon that I would rather die than accept certain medical treatments. As a 10-year-old, it’s one of the questions they ask when you go for CPTSD diagnosis: “did you at any point honestly really believe you were going to die?” Yeah, I was told I had to be prepared for that. I had to die for God if that was the option that was presented to me. Either take this medical treatment that God said I couldn’t have or die. I had to choose death. This cult literally kills kids for God.

A lot of people stayed because the alternative was to lose your entire support structure and social network. You were literally by yourself with nothing, which was the option I chose in the end. It’s high coercive control. This way, they say that you have the personality God wants you to have. Religious control and abuse of that power is the biggest theme that made it into Quantum Witch. It is very much again about urgency and choice: I think if people have been through similar things, it’s going to resonate with them.

VG247: During the demo, I got the impression that Ren is largely not interested in the religious beliefs shared with her by others in Quantum Witch, but she still appears to have a fascination with the Old Gods. I have two questions about this: is Ren on the fence, so to speak, about her beliefs? Does this align with any of your thoughts and feelings about religion now?

Nikki: Yeah, I am agnostic. I am a skeptic. I have to be open to the possibilities. A skeptic who isn’t open to possibilities isn’t a skeptic. They’re a cynic, and Ren is very much a skeptic. The majority of the characters in the game are just aspects of me that I’ve made into a character, it’s just a little piece of me that I’ve enhanced without turning it into a stereotype as far as I can.

Tyra [Ren’s partner] is more cynical: ‘come on, it’s nonsense’. And Ren’s like, ‘no, let’s go find out’. Her desire to go explore is going to lead her into things that she shouldn’t have explored in the way that she’s going to. But yeah, she is definitely that part of me who would like for there to be magic.

Image credit: NikkiJay

VG247: Quantum Witch’s marketplace – which features unnamed characters that bear uncanny resemblances to some iconic video game mascots – is what I assume to be a representation of some of your favourite games. The game itself regularly reminded me of themes and mechanics from Undertale, The Binding of Isaac, and even Stardew Valley. What other games or pieces of media helped inspire Quantum Witch, and how?

Nikki: I love Undertale. What I loved about Undertale is the mixture of all those styles and then you’d be talking to a character and suddenly you have to play a really fast reaction game. I can’t do that. I’m too old. But it was a big inspiration in the style of game I wanted to create.

As for the reason why the video game characters are there in the plot of [Quantum Witch’s] story; they do tie into the plot and there’s a little hint that they say. And I just loved putting in my alternate takes on who these characters were. You might know Paul Rose from Digitizer. At the very beginning of the project, I had all my story beats worked out. This is what’s going to happen. This is how it’s all going to interact, but I could not – for the life of me – start it.

I couldn’t build the bridges between these beats and Rose helped me a lot. He did a script treatment and some of the dialogue in the marketplace is directly from him; [one of the characters you meet is] talking about pills and I was like, ‘that that just fits in perfectly because there is a character later on who might need that pill’. It’s also a bit of a cue for me to have the characters talk about medication. .

I also wanted to add some queer flavor to them, so Princess Nectarine – who is similar to but legally distinct from a certain Nintendo character – is in a polycule with Bowser and Mario and they like to roleplay kidnapping. I did not set out to make a queer game. It’s turned out that way because I can’t help it, but it’s not all these characters are.

VG247: I know you’re a solo developer and this is a largely solo project, but I’m aware you’ve received some help with the whole endeavour. You mentioned Paul Rose. So could you tell me more about the people who have helped you with creating Quantum Witch and what they did?

Nikki: I must absolutely shout out Jerden Cooke for the music. We composed a lot of it together, [with] me mostly on the ukulele which you can hear in Ren’s theme. I don’t know if you’ve seen the video clip of David Lynch helping compose Laura’s Theme from Twin Peaks. Working with him is like that. I got some fantastic music which was like the music I could hear in my head when I started playing on the ukulele. He was able to put it down, basically extract it from my head, and put it into a word file.

And Paul Rose; I knew him through Digitizer meetups. We just got talking on Twitter one day and met up. He’s a great guy and things came about quite naturally because it was when Covid hit and a lot of TV work got cancelled. I said to him, look, you should get yourself on Fiverr. Put your writing services out there because people should be paying for this. I will be your first customer, and so I was! Without his help, this would have still been a collection of little story beats that I would have had no idea how to wire together.

And I’ve always wanted to work with Stephanie Sterling. What if I just ping her on Bluesky and say, “Hey, want to write a chapter of this game? It’s got a dancing skeleton in it.” She said, “Yeah, I’m in.” She said that when she started to do it, she wasn’t entirely sure whether it would be the right project because she just saw a [dancing] skeleton.

The more she wrote for [Quantum Witch] and the more she played the game, she went, “Yeah, this is my wheelhouse,” and she poured her religious trauma into it, which happened to just fit absolutely perfectly. It’s like I could not have asked for a better group of people to work with, and this is kind of what I want to say to indie developers who are solo. You’re not alone. You might just want one name on the credit, but it takes a village to raise a child.

Image credit: NikkiJay

VG247: I was taken aback by just how cosy the game is. Admittedly, even with the subject matter, I didn’t expect – largely given the art style – for this to be all doom and gloom, but I definitely didn’t expect something so jovial and honestly, straight-up funny. How did you decide that this was the approach you wanted to take when creating Ren’s story?

Nikki: [Stardew Valley], Chrono Trigger and Paper Mario: Thousand-Year Door are my three most played games. I love the style of Stardew Valley and I love that there’s some darkness hidden in Stardew Valley. I really liked the humor in it. I mean, if you thought I shouldn’t be laughing at this, but I am, then that’s an achievement. That’s exactly what I wanted. My main coping mechanism is humor. I’m not saying it’s a healthy coping mechanism, but it kind of works. And I mean, I was heavily influenced by reading a lot of Douglas Adams. and he was able to find humor in the most bleak situations.

And the graphical style… When I started this, I couldn’t draw a convincing stick figure. I look at the art that I did four years ago when I started messing about with this idea and it’s just embarrassing. Objectively terrible, but my main influences were Stardew Valley and The Darkside Detective. I loved the low-resolution style art, but there was so much character in them. So, I took a pixel art course on Udemy and a color theory course and… then just found, hey, I can do this now. That’s weird.

VG247: While looking into Quantum Witch and yourself, I found a lovely quote of yours from The Guardian: “A lot of religion is about giving up autonomy to some mystical power that you’ve never seen, heard or met. Over the course of the game, Ren takes that agency back… It’s a queer emancipation story.” Could you expand on this?

Nikki: The consequence of being yourself in a group that says ‘no, being yourself is wrong’ is that you just get thrown out. It’s weird because I think of my experiences as unique, but the themes they really do seem to be universal. Stephanie Sterling from The Jimquisition: she wrote a chapter of the later part of the game. I originally said to her, can you write these three scenes? She came back and said “I couldn’t stop writing. I just love this universe” It’s weird, because you wouldn’t know it was a different author. The religious oppression of queer people is the same wherever you go.

I’m really hoping just that I’ve got that balance right between a game that’s fun and cozy and humorous, – that there is a dancing skeleton who can see through time – but also has that deeper meaning and that message that you take back control.

A lot of people would look at this and think ‘you must be anti-religion’ and I’m 100% for freedom of religion, but that also means I’m 100% for freedom from religion. Whether you’ve got faith or not, nobody wants somebody else’s faith forced on you. You can’t have freedom of religion without freedom from religion.

Image credit: NikkiJay

VG247: How long is Quantum Witch set to be, and how many endings will there be? I know you also mentioned some side quests having various conclusions, as well as the game’s main endings being different depending on your decisions.

Nikki: I watched a tester play from beginning to end. It took him about three and a half hours, and he got my second favorite ending. He had questions about the lore and I said, “play it again and make different choices, and you’ll get a different ending, which will probably answer that for you.”

It’s difficult to say how many endings there are. There’s three definite categories of endings. There’s bleak. There’s interesting, where you kind of get a bittersweet ending, and then there’s the super happy ending, and there are variations on each of those. [These depend] on the characters you’ve helped. There’s also little puzzles that you can go and solve which can enhance the happy ending. It’s kind of like an open-world choose-your-own adventure book, but in pixel format.

If I’m going to do a full playthrough of all choices and all stories, I will easily put aside six or seven hours to do it and I wrote it. So, I’m not trying to discover it. I think it’s like The Stanley Parable in that sense.

VG247: I also learned that Quantum Witch could have been a novel. It could have initially started out that way and you then obviously decided to turn this into a game. How did that come about?

Nikki: One of my friends was doing the National Novel Writing November. I thought, I’ve got this story in my head which might fit, so I started writing it. I don’t know if anybody’s realized this, [but video games] are quite difficult to make, and novels are very easy because you just type… I was wrong and I really did not enjoy writing it.

I decided, thinking back on my childhood, I want to make this into a game. I want to make this interactive. Choice is a big theme. I want to give the player a choice. And it did end up as a point and click [game] for a while, rather than a plotformer. No matter what you do, it is a valid choice. There are no game over screens in Quantum Witch. Anything you do is just a part of the story and the game is over when you get the credits.

Quantum Witch is a surprisingly cosy and jovial take on topics of religious trauma and queer identities, but if your curiosity about this game is piqued, it’s up to you to find out all of its secrets. NikkiJay stresses that there’s so much to discover for those who are eager to explore the game and discover all of its various paths, endings, and dialogue.

For those who want to try Quantum Witch out, you can find a demo for the game on Steam, and it’ll also be participating in Steam’s Next Fest during June.

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