News: The Dark Queen of Mortholme - Exploring choice in a world that barely moves

Author: Game-A-Ton

✪ Be The Villain

I’ve always been drawn to games that poke at the edges of their own format-those odd, meta-leaning experiments that nudge players to reconsider what “winning” or “progress” even means. The Dark Queen of Mortholme fits neatly into that lineage: a short, indie experience that invites you to inhabit the so-called villain and challenges you to question the reflexes you’ve internalized over years of traditional game logic.

But as I spent time with it, I found myself wrestling with an unexpected tension. The game clearly wants to flip established patterns, yet it often hesitates between intent and execution. And as a result, I was frequently unsure whether my actions were feeding into the design or simply drifting in a space the developer hadn’t fully mapped out.

✪ Playing with Expectations

The game’s core premise immediately brings to mind other titles that explore the idea that defeating an opponent isn’t equivalent to “winning.” Slay the Princess, for example, built its entire visual-novel structure around questioning the meaning of choice, pushing players to confront the weight of intention within a clearly story-driven frame. That format naturally supports nuance; narrative branches make sense when every line of dialogue can shift the tone.

The Dark Queen of Mortholme, by contrast, operates in a more action-oriented shell. Attacking or not attacking doesn’t always correspond to narrative consequences, and the game often obscures whether it’s reacting to what I do or simply letting time pass. In my first playthrough, I allowed the hero to strike me repeatedly without retaliating. Nothing happened. No commentary, no shift, no acknowledgment. Then, in my second run, staying still a little longer prompted the hero to ask why I wasn’t moving. Was that delay really meaningful?

✪ The Burden of Subversion

Undertale inevitably comes to mind when discussing games that deliberately undermine player habits. Its pacifist route works because the mechanics and narrative reinforce each other; every confrontation is a moral decision, and one accidental kill genuinely matters. Yet even there, the strictness sometimes clashes with player intent, punishing a single slip in a way that feels more doctrinal than reflective.

The Dark Queen of Mortholme gestures toward that same philosophy but on a much smaller scale-and with less clarity. The result is a game that wants to rise above familiar tropes but sometimes falls into the inverse extreme: rejecting convention entirely as if the opposite of a trope were automatically meaningful. Subversion becomes a stance rather than a tool.

I admire the ambition, especially given that this is a short experience developed with modest scope. But I occasionally wished the game trusted itself enough to articulate what it wanted me to notice, instead of relying on the assumption that any deviation from tradition would inherently spark reflection.

✪ A Compact Experience with Striking Aesthetic Choices

For all my reservations, there are aspects of The Dark Queen of Mortholme that I sincerely enjoyed. The pixel-art presentation is undeniably polished. By focusing on a single plane and a contained set of animations, the developer was able to invest care into each asset. Attacks, flinches, and motions carry a crispness that many short indie projects struggle to achieve.

There’s also something quietly delightful about stepping into the villain’s skin with all the power that comes with it, only to watch the hero gradually chip away at that dominance. The slow shift in momentum, seeing control slip, moment by moment, gave the encounters an unexpected charm. Even if the narrative never fully resonated with me, that reversal of roles offered a perspective I genuinely enjoyed.

✪ Themes that Skim the Surface

The game touches on philosophical ideas about immutability and perpetual motion - concepts that could have provided an intriguing backbone. But for me, they remained surface-level gestures rather than fully developed themes. The characters never quite escape their archetypes, and without deeper emotional grounding, the dialogue felt more conceptual than affecting.

That said, I can imagine players who resonate more strongly with these ideas, especially those who enjoy interpreting sparse text as an invitation rather than a limitation.

✪ The Conclusion

The macabre, short-form, indie gem The Dark Queen of Mortholme is a compact, freely accessible experiment with a clear desire to challenge expectations. I found its aesthetic craftsmanship compelling and its premise intriguing, even if its mechanical and narrative intentions sometimes slipped through my fingers.

It’s the kind of game I’m ultimately glad exists: small, strange, and willing to tinker with the boundaries of genre, even if it never fully transformed my relationship with those boundaries.