notes on a fortune in gold

I don’t want to be presumptuous and say this is a “forgotten” game. I haven’t asked that many people if they know it, and if the creator of it sees this, I hope they don’t mind me focusing on it for this jam about forgotten video games.

A Fortune in Gold! was released on GameJolt on November 9, 2012 by YAdoacLeaf . I’m not sure exactly when I first played it, but it must have been within the first month of its release. I remember playing it in my dorm room at SUNY Oswego, alone and in the dark on the last day of the fall semester before I drove back home.

I'm interested now in the cycle of violence that strings the game along. I'm interested in regicide, and how different "hierarchies of power" are to me personally in 2021. I'm not sure if A Fortune in Gold! is totally political, a political text, or an RPG using politics as an aesthetic device (I'm also not sure if this division matters at all), but its metaphors resonate with and complicate our own political context today.

Gamejolt link

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