The following is an episode of With a Terrible Fate’s weekly podcast discussing video-game storytelling from all angles. Find all episodes here.


***WARNING: THIS EPISODE IS HAUNTED!*** The characters in the first game we discussed were haunting our podcasting software, so please excuse some small technical difficulties throughout the episode and a rather abrupt kickoff on account of a lost introduction. We jump directly into spoilers for Inscryption, a game that ought to be played without spoilers, so we strongly recommend only listening to this episode after playing! (Or, skip ahead to 45:30 to pass over this discussion.)

In a belated installment of the With a Terrible Fate podcast, Aaron and Dan travel back in time to Mother’s Day 2024 in a discussion ranging from the horrifying, to the metafictional, to the maternal, to the personal. We kick things off (0:00:00) with a long-overdue debrief of Inscryption following Dan’s completion of it and agree that it’s something you simply have to discover for yourself—as well as being something that you absolutely must discuss with others who have experienced it! Later (0:45:30), we contemplate portraits of some memorable mothers from our gaming lives. Finally (0:52:54), we wrap things up with an exploration of how single-player gaming can include a range of rich, intersecting, real-life ritual practices, which can equip us to game more mindfully if only we can attend to those rituals in our conscious mind.

Be warned (again!) for thorough spoilers of Inscryption, along with some smaller structural spoilers for elements of (in the motherhood section) Tales of Eternia, Tales of Hearts R, Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, Scarlet Nexus, Returnal, God of War & Ragnorok, and (in the ritual section) Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, along with some reprised spoilers for Inscryption.

Works Referenced


Dan Hughes

Dan Hughes - Video Game Analyst

Dan Hughes has dabbled in everything from playwriting to religious studies to YouTube personas. He is the seriesrunner for With a Terrible Fate's "Now Loading... The Video Game Canon!"  Learn more here.

Aaron Suduiko

Aaron Suduiko - Founder and Chief Video Game Analyst

Aaron Suduiko is the founder of With a Terrible Fate and a philosopher of video-game storytelling. He specializes in the impact of player-avatar relations on game stories.  Learn more here.

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