#Women of Xal

[plottwiststudios]

Women of Xal is 45% Off: We need one more review

✨ STEAM SUMMER SALE 2024 WOOO ✨

We need literally *one more review* for Steam to calculate our score. I'll put more details beneath the cut so as not to spam y'all, but if you're looking for a dating sim with poly, asexual, and aromantic options, or one with dark-skinned men and ladies, or one with political mystery and drama, or even one with silly alien shenanigans.... consider checking us out and dropping a review? :'> We'll be forever grateful.

Links are below. Click to continue reading if you're curious about the review situation. Oh, and feel free to join us on Discord!

STEAM | ITCH.IO | DISCORD

Hi everyone, Shald here with the details. So here's the deal. First off, if you don't know what Steam's user score system is, it basically just averages all the positive and negative reviews a game has to display a "rating". Here's an example from a beloved classic:

This rating obviously makes it easier for customers to see whether a game might be worth checking out at a glance, especially if they're just scrolling through a list of, say, visual novels currently on sale. The problem is that Women of Xal currently has 24 positive reviews on Steam, but only 9 of them are counted towards our user review score.

It seems like Steam doesn't count reviews from people who reviewed the game during Early Access or who didn't directly purchase the game from Steam - which, of course, is the *majority* of our Kickstarter supporters. I don't know how other Kickstarted indie games get around this, or if they ever do.

Which is very infuriating! I mean, look at this! Look at all these wonderful people who took the time to review our little indie game and just get totally ignored by the Valve Overlords. >:U

We need 10 total reviews from people who have purchased the game *directly* from steam in order for the platform to generate our "user score". At this point I genuinely don't even care if someone just reviews the game saying "It bad", I just want to see that score, I'm losing my mind 😂😢 If you've read this far into my late-night ramblings, thank you. I appreciate you. Maybe consider checking us out? :> STEAM | ITCH.IO | DISCORD

[justanothergaymess]

A Rome by any other name would be just as bleak

Assorted thoughts on Women of Xal by @plottwiststudios

Those who know me know that I have a fondness for Visual Novels, particularly indie ones. I have play-read a plethora of them over the years, with varying themes, qualities of execution, and lengths. Women of Xal is a first insofar as the liveblogging on this very blog has been read by one of the devs. It receives the dubios honour of being one of the few Visual Novels that have haunted me since starting it. And it is a first since I have to invoke death of the author on a post where I tag one of the authors - but the text must stand on its own themes and execution, regardless of paratextual authorial intent. Because Women of Xal is certainly a potent text speaking to a lot of technical and artistic skills of the author(s), but it is not as a dating sim that it remains lurking in the pit of my stomach. Women of Xal, to me, is an ambitious balancing act between horror, parody, and Brechtian theatre.

Spoiler warning and content note for sexual abuse, classism, racism, psychological and physical gendered violence, and slavery for everything under the cut.

Women of Xal casts the player-readers into the world of Xal, particularly and mostly the palace of Xanasca, as Xjena, a young woman. Xjena is secretly a seer, a person capable of accurately extrapolating the future from dreams, at the cost of constant fatigue. She has been summoned to Xanasca with four other young women to compete for the inheritance of the - still alive and seemingly well - Lady Xuna of Xanasca. By building and breaking alliances, Xjena races to find out the secrets of the palace and Xuna. Her abilities as a seer quickly get impeded by an antagonistic character named Marra - who aims to stop all seers, pitying them for being forced into government service by default once they reveal their abilities. As Xjena now cannot remember any future and past events she has already witnessed via her abilities, the player-reader still can - and guides her decisions through Xualian politics as the avatar of her magical ability and strength. It is revealed after some iterations and loops of the story that Xuna is herself a seer, and has seen the end of the world of Xal - knowing, because of Marra, very little about it, just that the five women she summoned to her palace have something to do with it.

So far, so normal a setup. Purely from the angle of a time-loop Visual Novel, WoX certainly is brilliantly crafted. The pacing, the mechanics of a visual novel having diegetic explanation and being subject to diegetic transformations, the way information are revealed and maintained across loops, antagonists vaguely aware of the existence of a player - WoX can certainly compete as a time-loop indie Visual Novel with the behemoths of that subgenre (and I will talk about the Golden elephant in the room later).

But WoX enters into an dangerous and hard-to-execute gambit in its worldbuilding: the Xualian society functions under an inverse patriarchy and shows hints of an inverse colorism, with white skin not existing whatsoever and the only white background characters ever appearing being humans visiting Xal in a diplomatic-cultural exchange between the planes. I have uninstalled enough digital and put down enough physical novels operating on the premise of oppressed-as-oppressor. WoX earned the benefit of my doubt and subsequent maintenance of attention by removing white people alltogether. Xualian society is heavily stratified by the status of its women of color (status attainable by military and government service as well as the accumulation of wealth), with the completely disenfranchised enslaved lower class being its men of color.

WoX shines truly as a parody - I understand enough about the patriarchy (and the YouTube algorithm in Germany constantly pushes anime summary videos with absolutely disgusting titles and preview pictures) that I know a genre such as the harem anime/manga exists [and I feel obligated to point out the collapse of two very different orientalisms into one within the title of the genre alone, far be it from me to know its reception and success in the West], as well as the majority of all media focusing its attention on men as agents, forming homosocial relations with one another, while women are relegated to the position of object for occassional sexual gratification. Running around Xal as Xjena, seeing all these powerful women of Xualian politics, veterans and career politicians and leaders, all fighting in different alliances and with different intentions, while men are relegated to serving Xjena both in household activities and sexually, is a brilliant parody. The novelty of said parody quickly falls off, however, and I am left with that bitter feeling in my stomach knowing that for every self-aware parody-via-matriarchy like WoX, there will be a hundred thousand novels that play the patriarchy straight, with real world consequences. When Valimer, a teenager and victim of the physical and verbal abuse of one of Xjena's competitors for the inheritance because he as a man dared to speak up against the matriarchy, continues his subsequent scenes and arc being just as worried about the well-being of his abuser, when Proxis, also a teenager and victim of attempted sexual abuse continues to smile and stay joyful and subservient despite his experiences, when Xaris, a young man with the ambition of becoming a theatre actor, breaks down crying in Xjena's arms after having suffered through sexual assault, it all is so familiar - conversations I have had with so many women I stopped counting at some point.

But the bitterness eminating from between the lines does not stop here, far from it. Xal's society does not only allude to the present-day patriarchy. In scouring the libraries of both the palace and the city, with which I spent the majority of my first loop, I stumbled upon the governing articles between the regions of Xal: Men are not only expected to be subservient to women. They are codified as property, and cannot become free unto themselves. Xal is a slave society. Proxis, Xaris, Valimer, the aforementioned abuse victims, were all legally bought by Xuna, and placed within the brothel of her palace. Men start of as property of their mothers, until at the age of 12 being able to be sold; as indentured husbands, servants, and/or sex slaves. To my knowledge, the player-reader never learns who works Xal's mines and fields; still, we know who works the kitchens, cleans the houses, maintains the gardens. Xualian notions of status and human property closely reflect Roman society, even if collapsing gendered and enslaved categories. That only heightens the severity of the society portrayed, the inherent horror. I went into Women of Xal, a game with very little documentation outside authorial posting, with no knowledge of its worldbuilding; I expected a dating sim meets political thriller where I lesbian slut my way through court intrigue in a somewhat generic fantasy setting. Instead, I am thrust unto the lowest steps of the cursus honorum, with all the baggage that implies.

The struggle I have with WoX as a dating sim, the struggle it is in a way brilliant in invoking, is that not only are the women dateable, but the men as well. Proxis, Xaris, Valimer, they are not only victims one can (optionally) support, but also romance, and also, very explicitly, fuck. Indeed, as soon as one gains control over Xjena's day, one can stroll into the brothel section of the palace and demand to sleep with the men there. Now, the ethics of slowly building up a genuine friendship with these young victims of slave trade and sex slavery and arriving at a place of mutual understanding for the negotiation of consent are not something I can debate in the space of a throwaway post I am writing freely just to get these thoughts out of my mind. But the ethics of fucking them first-day are easily labelled as nonexistent. It does not get meaningfully less disquieting dating the women. Lady Xuan, the matriarch of the local region, owner of the brothel and its sex slaves, is also a romance option. So are Clanice and Merixa, two women firmly anchored within the violence of Xualian matriarchy. Velvet, the most outspoken advocate against the Xualian matriarchy amongst the competitors for Xuna's inheritance, who ends up losing an eye to the assault by an heiress of a proud slave-owning family, still ends up policulizing up to Clanice, sending the player-reader selfies with her. As a dating sim, WoX asks me if I want to romance slaves, a "benevolent" slave owner, or slavery defenders and their girlfriends; as a player-reader, I answer that I want the slave society of Xal abolished at gunpoint and knifeedge.

The fantasy Rome of Xal comes fully equipped with its own girlbossified Cassiuses, Brutuses, and Spartacuses, not just Caesars and Ciceros. The aforementioned Marra, moreso acting against seers and their abilities, is impeding the government's ability to exploit the abilities of the seers to maintain its structural integrity while revolution is brewing. Perhaps that is merely a side effect, perhaps that is intention on Marra's side. Plenty of the slave-servants at the palace resent the matriarchy, sometimes louder, sometimes quieter. An entire region of Xal is mentioned that is semi-independent from the rest of Xal where the freedom of men is tolerated; men escaping there are difficult to be retrieved by their former legal owners [despite the social structure of Xal being so romanesque, I could not help but whisper "Mason-Dixon" under my breath in horror learning that part of the lore]. And last but certainly not least, there are the revolutionaries surrounding Tannae, a woman that appears as a side character in the story a handful of times. She openly scoffs at the matriarchy, and later attempts to assassinate Xuna and one of Xuna's lovers (who Xuna also legally owns) in an attempt to kickstart the revolution by killing the most vocal centrist reformist and her confidant. The so-called True Ending of WoX happens by carrying two words of memory across the time-loop and the amnesia imposed by Marra: "aggressive progressives", a warning Xuna designed to tell her if such an assassination against her and her confidants is imminent. The absolute absurdity of using "progressives" here, given the fact that it is a term within the present often used to designate a reformist antirevolutionary electoralist section of the settler population of the US, can be left aside. The fact is that Tannae, the revolutionaries, and Marra are right. While the revolutionaries towards the end of the story send in assassination squads into the palace and an assortment of the highest-ranking veterans, generals, and matriarchs of Xal reside there, multiple women complain that they sympathize with the cause, but draw the line at murder. I do not. The palace houses several of the people most pivotal in upholding the slave society. It is a more than valid target. The True Ending of our journey as player-readers through girlboss fantasy Rome rests in saving girlboss Cicero and her favorite slave from assassination. The beating of the tell-tale buried between the lines becomes ever louder as one progresses through the story: WoX is a parodistic horror game about being on the wrong side of history.

WoX is built upon an absurdist inversion of the status quo in its matriarchy; and, as explained before, it rests close to Rome and Roman slavery in structure. Still, it bears mentioning that in the exchange between the planes, quite fittingly, Xal maintains close alignment with the US on actual diegetic Earth. A Black man from the US gets hired by Xuna to run the day-to-day activities of the brothel; when Xjena befriends him, he mentions that he came to Xal knowing little besides that race and racism did not exist there, only to find similarly strong kinds of systemic violence in this hoped-for utopia. Xualian slavery does not espouse the same kind of bio- and necropolitics as the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery. And yet, given that the US is built and running on slavery, as well as the West's present-day hegemony being built upon the transatlantic slave trade and subsequently financed imperialist exploitation, between the lines of WoX run not only echoes of slavery past but also present. In that sense, I am more than willing to delete this post should any of my Black mutuals find it insufficient and wrong; if you made it this far, your attention was never expected, but is an honour to be granted for certain, no matter what you think of my writing here.

WoX therefore juxtaposes its inverted magical fantasy violence with real-world violence. This is not the first time-loop indie Visual Novel I play-read and analyze where the narration follows a path through a labyrinthian mansion filled with exploited and assaulted servants while those from an oppressor class compete for the inheritance of the small empire of the recluse head of the household. Admittedly, Umineko No Naku Koro Ni is quite different from Women of Xal, and yet, as a behemoth in both volume and impact in the indie Visual Novel scene, I kept coming back to it while playing WoX. I have play-read only the first two chapters of Umineko, and yet, I would label it as one of the very few successful fantasy inversions of oppressor and oppressed. When rich asshole fuckboy Ushiromiya Battler gets gratuitously tortured by female witches and demons in the frame narrative, often while using signifiers of BDSM, it only serves to underline the horror of the unacknowledged and mundane sexualized verbal violence he and his male family members subject female family members and servants alike to. Women of Xal is far more reserved in showing the mundane, real violence it inverts, only hinting at it from time to time. WoX also maintains a close entaglement between player-reader and main character; Xjena's actions are, by all means, the result of my personal free will as player-reader. Umineko invokes horror and gore in trying to find a language for the trauma of structural sexualized violence; Women of Xal invokes comedy and parody while placing the main character, a woman of color, and the player-reader by proxy, in an absurd, inverted oppressor class. The monstrous of Umineko is the subtle violence of everyday patriarchy coming back to haunt itself, the monstrous of WoX is the player-readers complicity while being robbed of any choice to also take up arms against the status quo.

The absurdity of WoX's base premise aligns closely with the concept Brechtian Alienation in Brechtian Theatre; through constant reminders of the performativity of the play, the audience is tasked with untangling its commentary on the real world. I do not know if the author(s) of WoX intended such a thing or not, but the Brechtian effect of WoX's base premise manages to bypass the base level of coping that I had to develop helping dozens upon dozens of acquaintances, friends, and kin through abusive relationships, marriages, and expriences of assault. Women of Xal leaves me with a haunting sense of dread in regards to the patriarchy, one that adequately fits the severity of it. Would I recommend WoX as a dating sim? No. Would I recommend WoX as an experimental piece of Brechtian horror? Yes. What else remains there to be said? Marra and Tannae are right, death to all Romes, whichever name they might adapt.

[maeljade]

tagged by @scionshtola

Challenge: make a poll with five of your all time favorite characters, and then tag five people to do the same. See which character is everyone's favorite

I'll tag @wisismydumpstat, @wingedasarath, @zeloinator and @elizabethrobertajones

[vncdraws]

Every time I remember these characters exits, my neurons just flare up.

[maeljade]

i finally figured it out. my favorite ship dynamic. murderous

[cocolacola]

thinking about xal'atath like lol. girl where are you

[plottwiststudios]

Offer: "Have you thought about tapping into the Chinese market with your game? We have services~"

Me: *Looks at miHoYo , Genshin, Natlan, and the toxic justifications that refuses to say the vile quiet part out loud.*

Me: *Looks at ALL of the character designs in my game* I... I don't think this offer has seen recent Genshin Impact discourse -- or the fact my game hasn't even sold well where diversity is most encouraged...

[maeljade]

I present to you: Blorboposting about my niche interest game maybe a few hundred people know.

[maeljade]

I won't lie I think "I had a crush on you for superficial reasons when we first met but then that went away when I spent time with you and we became best friends built on a foundation of genuine respect and care and THEN I fell in love with you properly" is an underrated trope and so much can be done with it

[vncdraws]

Throne Games

All Hail the Queen.

[anestofocs]

The Light of Justice.

Eeee! This gorgeous artwork of Crowe is by @nekojirou ! Who did the art for Women of Xal, our personal favourite Visual Novel by @plottwiststudios

(Higher quality image coming soon)

[beautiful-boy-bracket]

WELCOME TO THE BEAUTIFUL BOY BRACKET

lets start with the minor character section (both sections are in this post), where we have 32 characters handpicked from your submissions by me personally. they are as follows:

Shinjiro Nozomi from Entropic Float: This World Will Decay And Disappear

Xiao Yin from Dislyte

Cherry (Kaoru Sakurayashiki) from Sk8 The Infinity

Kashima Yuu from Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun

Argalia from Library Of Ruina

Haku from Spirited Away

Mytho from Princess Tutu

Emrys from The Hero's Journey

Magnus Chase from Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard series

Kusuriuri from Mononoke, Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales

Kai Satou from Your Turn To Die

Santa from Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors

Abi from Akatsuki no Yona

Ramuda from Hypnosis Microphone

Ronald from Jackson's Diary

Ryuji Ayukawa from Blue Period

Yuuya Sakazaki from Hatoful Boyfriend

Cure Infini from HUGtto Precure

Richard from Tales of Graces

Gero Akoya from Cute High Earth Defense Club Love!

Elpizo from Mega Man Zero 2

YiGuang from My Vow To My Liege

Raikou Shimizu from Nabari No Ou

Lio Fotia from Promare

Aurelius from Royal Alchemist

Yuliy Jirov from Sirius the Jaeger

Mochizuki Yukimitsu from Skate Leading Star

Yuri Lowell from Tales Of Vesperia

Lord Golden, aka The Fool, from The Realm of the Elderlings by Robin Hobb

Jim Hawkins from Treasure Planet

Epel Fermier from Twisted Wonderland

Valimer from Women of Xal

some of these names may be misspelled, which i will find out when googling them again to save their images; fault lies with their submitters /lh

as almost 3/4 of these characters have only gotten one submission each, the minor bracket is not seeded, and the matchups will be randomized

now for the major bracket! as this one is possible to seed, i present you with...

the round one matchups in the major bracket will be:

Howl Jenkins Pendragon from Howl's Moving Castle vs Artemis Fowl from the Artemis Fowl series

Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender vs Izaya Orihara from Durarara!!

Yoshiya "Joshua" Kiryu from The World Ends With You vs Gerry Keay from The Magnus Archives

Kurapika from Hunter X Hunter vs Lan Wangji from Mo Dao Zu Shi | The Untamed

Alucard from Castlevania vs Aaravos from The Dragon Prince

Legolas Greenleaf from Lord Of The Rings vs Vash The Stampede from Trigun Stampede

Taako from The Adventure Zone vs Albedo from Genshin Impact

Leonardo Hamato from Rise Of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles vs Andromeda Shun from Saint Seya

Dorian Gray from The Picture Of Dorian Gray vs Yuri Plisetsky from Yuri!!! On Ice

Gunpowder Tim from The Mechanisms vs Affogato Cookie from Cookie Run

Klavier Gavin from Ace Attorney vs Marluxia from Kingdom Hearts

Mettaton EX from Undertale vs Chuuya Nakahara from Bungou Stray Dogs

Link from The Legend Of Zelda vs Essek Thelyss from Critical Role

Angel Devil from Chainsaw Man vs Kian Stone from Just Roll With It

Tamaki Suoh from Ouran High School Host Club vs Yuri Leclerc from Fire Emblem

Wallace from Pokemon vs Sesshomaru from InuYasha

[maeljade]

I am thinking very reasonable amounts of time about both games and all the spouses in them.

*puts my interests in a blender* haha two for one

[wine-dark-soup]

this doesnt include the games i need to START (disco elysium women of xal pentiment)

[elfyourmother]

Seeing the post about poly relationships in Baldurs Gate 3 and how disappointed you are with it I know a game that probably won't disappoint with its poly options! It's called "Women of Xal", is a visual novel and has one of the biggest black casts in any game I know.

this is exactly what I’m tired of. this shit right here. this is why I’m so irritated w bg3 romance. Months and months of folk telling me things like this, hyping it up and then the game comes out and it’s the same ol shit as usual.

I don’t trust anyone hyping anything to me anymore and I wish y’all would stop. Just stop!!!!. All it does it upset me even more when I actually see the thing and it’s the same old fuckery I have always gotten. I am middle aged I have been doing this same exact song and dance more than half my life at this point I am TIRED. I am tired of “this has black ppl in it” and it’s the worst most offensive portrayals possible. I’m tired of “you’ll love this it has poly” and it’s “you get to sometimes fuck other people and they make jokes abt threesomes and they’ll call you a selfish whore and make you choose”

leave me alone

[plottwiststudios]

Xjena of Jhaliel from "Women of Xal: Unannounced Project".

Going forward, all updates like these will be found first on our Patreon, including playable stuff we release. This blog will instead focus on big news for the studio, and fun shenanigans.