Be Your Own Boss.

The 21st century to date has been a procession of situations in which you’re forced to explain the readily explicable. Nothing is true, no lessons were learned, nothing can be taken for granted; thinking adults in 2025 are occasionally forced to argue with fellow travelers about such fundamentally obvious things as “you should have a baseline level of care for other people” and “bleach is not medicine.” Anyone who feels angry and insane right now is just paying sufficient attention.

That same disconnect lies at the heart of the furor over generative AI as a creative tool. On one side, an army of plagiarism robots that burn forests and drink the sea to create infinite pages from Thomas Kinkade’s How to Draw Manga; on the other, anyone who understands the value of human expression, emphasis on the human. Offshoring any part of your creative mind or soul to glorified autocorrect is an act of unsolicited surrender. You’ve volunteered for erosion. There’s less of you now, whether you acknowledge that or not.

If there’s one silver nugget in this septic tank, it’s the potential for a new appreciation of the elemental strangeness of being human. This is a messy, imprecise, unstable existence, and it’s the only game in town. In any form it takes, from disposable kitsch to a great national novel, art is a story we tell one another to try and make life make more sense.

This week, we’re celebrating that. These are games that we appreciate specifically because a large language model could never have produced them: they’re too weird, too horny, too specific. In an age where the entirety of pop culture is threatening to collapse into thin gruel, these are projects with a careful human touch. In 2025, that’s become more valuable than ever before, and worth celebration.

Defeating a challenge in a game is usually a matter of persistence. We’re long past the era of quarter-munching arcade games; nowadays, it’s expected that you’ll simply respawn on failure and be allowed to try again. Just try again, returning with more knowledge and muscle memory. As long as you keep going, you can eventually triumph. The game is meant to be beaten! That boss will fall before you if you just keep on going, again and again.

What an absolutely terrifying notion that must be for the boss on the receiving end, huh?

The Dark Queen of Mortholme is a short “anti-game” you can play for free right now on itch.io, with a Steam version releasing soon. As the titular Dark Queen, you play as the creature straight out of a Soulslike boss fight, effortlessly crushing a would-be hero who seeks to overthrow you. It’s laughably easy to do so, as you’ll dispatch them in just one or two hits regardless of what you do. With a click of your fingers, their fallen body is incinerated, and you return to your throne… only to hear increasingly familiar footsteps as they return once more. And now they’ve started learning your attack patterns.

What follows is a sequence of increasingly tense battles that see your once massive health bar dwindle a little more with every attempt. And every time, the hero and the queen will talk back and forth, the initial barbs and imperious attitude rapidly corroding under the repeated onslaught. Eventually, it becomes clear you can’t win. You literally cannot, in fact — the input reading eventually overpowers you until defeat is certain. The hero will eventually triumph, and the queen must face the only concept that’s ever truly terrified her: change. Impermanence. Finality.

It’s a brief jaunt that doesn’t overstay its welcome, running about 20 minutes. But it’s a novel experience that has persisted with me after finishing, based its strong writing. The core of Dark Queen of Mortholme‘s experience is the conversation between the hero and the queen, as they continue their dialogue and existential pondering between each failed attempt. It’s fascinating to watch the facade of this haughty and powerful boss fight give way to confusion, frustration, and then a growing sense of dread and terror at just what this means for her.

When asked to write about games with the notion of “fuck AI-generated content”, numerous ideas popped into my head about what I could write about. I settled on Dark Queen of Mortholme partly because I just wanted to spotlight a neat little experience that likely would slip under the radar otherwise. But it’s also a concept that requires a very human understanding of games and psychology. It required a person to play a challenging game before asking “Wouldn’t it be horrifying for the boss to realise the loop I’m destined to break with enough time?” The game had to be played, the oddities observed, and then the creative spark put to actually making something from that errant thought. Yes, it would be weird! But what a fascinating conversation you could have with the characters in those moments.

AI does not create; it simply takes the pieces from the people it has observed, then rearranges them in a vaguely recognisable shape. People making the observations are the ones who create, because they’re able to observe and experience the world around them before using these as a catalyst for those creations. We don’t create in a vacuum. The Dark Queen of Mortholme required a person who had played enough games to make an observation about them, and then to harness their skills to explore the other side of that observation.

Any number of steps in their life could have been substituted, however, and then the game may not have existed. Perhaps the creator didn’t play Soulslike games. Maybe they lacked the programming skills to make their own take on it. Or perhaps they gave up on their attempts to write it due to writer’s block or lack of inspiration. We live in the timeline that led to The Dark Queen of Mortholme‘s creation, and I think it’s a better timeline for it.

But if these novel ideas aren’t created by people, then the AI cannot observe them. Perhaps now an AI can look at Dark Queen of Mortholme and replicate what it does to some small degree, but it lacks the understanding needed to say “Yeah, that’s weird, I should make something about the inverse.” But we will have no new experiences. The creative worlds simply grow stale and stagnant without that human spark, and so AI should be rejected from the creative process.

The world needs more short, sweet, and interesting experiences born from a creative spark. It does not need those experiences regurgitated ad infinitum into homogenous slop. Fuck AI, and go take a chance on a weird and cool little game. For my money, I recommend The Dark Queen of Mortholme as one such cool little game. AI could never.