Trying to be Queer in Choice-Based Games

17 Jul, 2026

This blog post contains spoilers for Baldur’s Gate 3, Fallen Hero: Rebirth, Fallen Hero: Retribution, and Scarlet Hollow.

My favourite scene in Malin Ryden's Fallen Hero interactive novel series¹ isn't the museum heist where you first reveal your supervillain persona. It isn't the flashbacks to the horrifying Heartbreak incident that ended your superhero career, or the climactic confrontation with Los Diablos kingpin Hollow Ground. In fact, it’s a scene that players could easily miss.

My favourite scene in Fallen Hero, the one I just can't get out of my head, is a scene where two queer women talk about their very complicated relationship.

Let’s set the scene. Fallen Hero follows Erica Lake, formerly the telepathic superhero Sidestep, who seven years following a mission that went so catastrophically wrong she was presumed dead, has returned to the city of Los Diablos. Except this time, she’s a “supervillain”; the anarchist revolutionary Entropy, trying to overthrow the interlocking corruption of government, corporations, and crime that have run Los Diablos for years. During her old superhero career, Erica was close to Julia Ortega, better known as Charge, then-leader of Los Diablos’ premiere superteam, the Rangers. They were friends, and then they became something more; they never committed to anything or formally labeled it, but they kissed and they flirted and they loved each other. “Just gals being pals”, as Erica puts it.

Reuniting by chance in the present, a not insignificant portion of the game is spent as the two rekindle their relationship. Julia is the only one who’s actually close to Erica, enough to know that something’s wrong even if she doesn’t know the truth. Erica knows that getting close to a member of the only team who could actually stop her is a huge wrench in her plans, but can’t stop herself. And so as the game continues, they exchange blows as Entropy and Charge and exchange kisses as Erica and Julia, all culminating in a date in Ortega’s apartment where the two just talk.

It’s a scene that works for a lot of reasons. Julia is one of the only people on the planet immune to Erica’s telepathy, almost putting Erica on the back foot in a way she rarely is in other conversations where she can scan someone’s surface thoughts and know what they think and what they mean. Erica is also heavily implied to be autistic and struggles a lot with reading body language, and her uncertainty of how Julia is feeling almost creates a tension in a lot of their interactions.

It’s also a great scene because it explores how their queerness has affected the ways they both have approached their relationship, and why in the past they never really committed to something more than a nebulous, for desperate want of a better term, situationship. Julia says she never wanted to risk deepening their relationship because she was already a divisive public figure, and she wanted to be judged based on her actions. She didn’t want her queerness or Erica to be used as weapons against her by her critics.

“I was worried that if I turned out to be not straight, people would blame that instead of my own choices. They’d turn it into a bad thing. Something to blame for my actions.” [Julia] looks at [Erica], her eyes warm and intense. “Someone to blame for my actions. I didn’t want to put that on you.”

Erica’s apprehension comes from a few sources (some of which are heavy spoilers), but a large one is the fact that she’s a trans woman. And as a transfemme telepath, she spent her entire early transition knowing full well how the people around her were judging her, dismissing, hating her for simply existing. Having been stealth for years by the time of the game, including the entire time she’s known Julia, the fear of how she could react has made Erica keep her at arms length.

Despite that though, it’s a scene that’s also very tender. After seven years of believing Erica was dead, of reflecting on their relationship and what she’d do differently, Julia realises that Erica is the person she cares about the most and she wants to keep her close. Erica, meanwhile, finally comes out to Julia and is embraced for who she is. It’s very touching especially in the midst of the chaos that surrounds it.

This scene is also entirely optional. And none of that backstory is strictly true.

It was true when I played Fallen Hero, because that’s what I named my character, because I decided to play as a trans woman, and because I decided to romance Ortega, but Fallen Hero is a series about choices. While the bones of the story are the same no matter what - your character was the telepathic superhero Sidestep, who was believed dead following a catastrophic mission seven years ago and returns to Los Diablos as a villain, with the core personality of “traumatised, paranoid cynic” - the specifics of the character and the narrative are largely up to you, from what characters you choose to get close to, to what your supervillain goals and operations are.

The literal first choice you make in the game was which gender the two possible love interests, Ortega and Dr. Mortum, will be, and while I thought it was an interesting idea to open up romances to any player (one presumably made easier because Fallen Hero is exclusively text-based), it didn’t leave me with much confidence that the game would do anything other than write a straight relationship and change the pronouns. My doubts continued even after I decided that my character was trans during character creation. And yet, at seemingly every turn, it proved those doubts wrong, making that queerness… not necessarily emphasised, but as important to the characters as it is in real life.

It’s the first time I’ve ever played a choice-based game that was willing to pick scabs.

In a short essay from 2022 ², Elizabeth Sandifer identified two tendencies within queer genre fiction, which she described as “scab-picking” and “hugboxing”; scab-picking queer genre fiction is that which uses art as a tool for engaging with our oppression, and creates worlds that are tools for analyzing it. Hugboxing, meanwhile, uses art to imagine our liberation from oppression, and creates worlds where we aren’t oppressed. It’s a spectrum rather than a dichotomy, and I’ve found it an interesting way to look at some of my favourite queer games ³.

Looking at it through this framework, it quickly becomes clear why I found Fallen Hero so effective as a work of queer art. There are a lot of amazing queer games out there, but games with customisable characters and choice-based narratives rarely acknowledge queerness when it’s a choice you make - they’re so far on the hugboxing end of the spectrum that they arguably stop being queer, the relationships, narratives, and characters not even acknowledging queerness and what it means to the characters. Fallen Hero, by contrast, was a game that felt like it rewarded the choice to explore queerness, adding so much depth to the characters and their relationships that I honestly can’t imagine a version of the game without them. This is, of course, greatly helped by the fact that Ryden is a queer developer.

Larian Studio’s Baldur’s Gate 3, the favourite RPG amongst people who don’t play RPGs, widely advertised the fact you can play a trans character as a feature and was especially praised for its queer representation, so much so that it won multiple awards because of it including the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Video Game and multiple Gayming Awards.

Which is unfortunate, because Baldur’s Gate 3 is so far on the hugboxing side that I don’t think it really acknowledges queerness existing. It’s a game where every love interest is playersexual - a term I use with derision because Fallen Hero has shown me that you can make a game with a cast full of bisexual characters and explore their queerness in compelling ways, something Baldur’s Gate 3 fails to do completely. The romantic relationships play out identically regardless of gender, never actually considering the way that someone being queer can shape their personalities, outlooks, and beliefs; it writes straight romances and slaps a queer coat of paint on it. If anything, I think that the game itself still leans into “token queer” tropes in spite of its proudly-proclaimed queerness; of the thousands of NPCs throughout the game, there are maybe three textually queer ones? The sole lesbian couple, and one single trans character (and every one of her dozen lines of dialogue is about how incredible and amazing one of the cis party members is).

[Update: The recent Scarlet Hollow Rumors update added multiple scenes discussing small town homophobia and transphobia, making this article outdated. Lmao. Maybe I'll update this segment in future, but I do really like the new additions]

By contrast, a better approach to hugboxing is taken by Black Tabby Games’ episodic horror visual novel, Scarlet Hollow. In Scarlet Hollow, the player character is an estranged member of the historied Scarlet family, invited to their titular ancestral hometown for the funeral of their aunt by their cousin Tabitha. Supernatural shenanigans ensue, all revolving around the dark secrets of the Scarlet family, and you investigate the mystery alongside a few potentially romanceable locals; headstrong cryptozoology youtuber Stella, goth general store manager Kaneeka⁴, sickly artist Reese, librarian and single dad Oscar, stylish diner server Avery, and a few others.

As a work of Southern Gothic, Scarlet Hollow isn’t afraid to contend with the dark aspects of the American South; the Scarlet family are old money wealth in North Carolina, with the dark history of labour law violation and confederate collaboration that that implies; the Scarlet coal mines still remaining such a vital part of the town’s economy that it’s only a couple of steps away from returning to an early 20th century company town; and the game doesn’t shy away from themes of contemporary and historic racism, especially through the relationship between the white Sybil and her mixed-race children Kaneeka and Miles. In spite of that, though, Scarlet Hollow is a… friendly is the wrong term, but it doesn’t care if you’re queer or not. Tabitha’s relationship with Stella⁵ when they were teenagers wasn’t forbidden because they were both girls, but because her mother was abusive and controlling. Nonbinary Avery is an outsider because they’re new to a town where everyone already has a history with each other, not because of their gender identity. And like Baldur’s Gate 3, it's also a game where every love interest is bisexual.

This approach works much better here than it does in Baldur’s Gate 3, despite being set in the “real world”; it’s partially handwaved away by the mention that the town is more secular than you’d expect from a town in the South, but the game also doesn’t shy away from considering what queerness means to the characters. Black Tabby Games actually updated the game to add a few lines reflecting every character’s romantic preferences and history; Kaneeka is nervous about the fact that she’s never been in a relationship with another woman, but Stella is far more confident in her bisexual identity to the point that you can be the one who’s uncertain in your queerness, expressed with one of the funniest dialogue options in the game.

Scarlet Hollow doesn’t go as far as Fallen Hero in exploring queerness, but in spite of that it’s still able to have some effective and meaningful moments of exploring it. It’s a hugboxing work of fiction, but in a way where it can still acknowledge the ways in which being queer can change someone’s approach to relationships and life, and unlike something like, say, Stardew Valley where everyone has the same variation of “I’ve never felt this way about another girl/guy”, it’s something that the different possible love interests have different histories and feelings with. It’s a small detail, but it’s one that adds so much to their characterisation and makes them feel that much more authentic.

(Maybe this is also a point that should be expanded into a full post of its own, but it’s also worth noting that both Fallen Hero and Scarlet Hollow use romance as a starting point for a new direction the story can take, whereas Baldur’s Gate 3 and a lot of other games with romanceable characters treat getting together as the ending victory condition, where the character immediately loses all of their personality and just has some slightly warmer voice lines.)

In conclusion, games have been bragging about their meaningful choices for a very long time and yet at the same time choosing to play a queer character is not considered an important narrative decision within the eyes of most developers. To a queer audience this can easily feel unsatisfying and completely disconnected from actual lived queer experiences. Choice-based indie games by queer creators, such as Fallen Hero and Scarlet Hollow, have shown that it’s possible, but it requires effort and perspective from queer people’s lived experiences, two things triple-A gaming is averse to. Play more indie games and support queer developers I guess⁶.