This past week might go down in history as one of the best in video game history. We’ve gotten at least two game of the year contenders, an excellent Mario Kart rival, an award-winning indie, and at least one game that’s destined to become a cult hit. There’s no way you could possibly play them all this weekend, let alone in the next month. We’re eating too good right now.
But it’s not just that it’s a great week for new games; it’s also been a killer week for games that are explicitly about deconstructing gender. Three games — Silent Hill f, Consume Me, and Baby Steps — dig into that topic in three completely different ways. Through psychological horror, grounded self-portrait, and slapstick comedy, these games examine how society puts various kinds of pressure on us through strict gender roles, and then proceeds to bash those ideas in with a lead pipe. That gives us 2025’s most unlikely triple feature, all in the span of one week.
The biggest name in the bunch is Silent Hill f, Konami’s new swing on its classic horror franchise. It takes the series to Japan circa the 1960s and follows a girl named Hinako whose hometown, Ebisugaoka, is engulfed by fog and monsters. As has always been the case for the series, it’s a cryptic horror game that digs into its hero’s psyche and pulls out her deepest fears. The team behind the project has not been shy about how gender plays into that, revealing to PC Gamer that the game is largely set in the 1960s because it aligned with Japan’s women’s rights movement.
That thread is impossible to ignore in the final game. Hinako struggles to be the traditional picture of femininity that’s expected of her. She’s bullied for being too boylike, and even pressured by her own family. Journal entries lay her inner turmoil bare, as Hinako writes about feeling like there are two different people living inside of her: the Hinako she’s expected to be, and the one she actually is. Transformation is a major theme throughout the story as Hinako looks to break free from her own skin.
While vastly different in tone, Consume Me acts as a perfect complement to that story. The Seamus McNally Grand Prize-winning indie is a colorful life-sim that turns the real teenage experience of creator Jenny Jiao Hsia into a minigame-filled autobiography. It’s all about the pressures of being a teenage girl and trying to conform with society’s idea of womanhood. It begins as a story about Jenny’s eating disorder, as she becomes obsessed with losing weight and getting hot. But the expectations keep stacking up as the story goes. She has to maintain a relationship and get into a good school on top of that. It’s an honest portrait that shows the impossible juggling act we expect young girls to maintain.
On the flipside, Baby Steps gives us its perspective on masculinity in the most unexpected way possible. On its surface, the latest game from the team behind Ape Out is just a silly walking simulator with nothing to say. It appears to be an absurd bit of ragebait, as you try (and fail) to move a manchild through an open world by controlling one leg at a time. But the deeper you get, the more Baby Steps presents itself as a surprisingly sincere game about living up to the ideal image of manhood.
The main character, Nate, is insecure about his shortcomings as a man. He’s awkward and out of shape, struggling to even walk a few feet on his wobbly legs. At every turn of his adventure, he meets men who are more capable than him in every way. One pretty boy is a confident explorer who has no trouble hiking up a mountain. Then there’s the recurring gaggle of nude donkey men, a himbo brigade that pressures Nate into ditching his own goals to get cigarettes for them. Nate gets pushed around at every turn, and he can’t bring himself to ask for help or accept it from anyone around him. Stick with Baby Steps to the end and you’ll find a touching conclusion that encourages men to reject the societal image of the macho man and learn to be comfortable with who they actually are instead.
You could say that all three of these games circle to that same point, in a way. Hinako, Jenny, and Nate are all on very different journeys, but all roads lead back to them finding their true selves. They all share a common antagonist, fighting back against societal forces that try to shove them into neat gender roles. But only one of those heroes gets to smash some faces in with a crowbar along the way.
