Six young, queer, and racialized travelers navigate intersecting paths across Asian urban landscapes in this RPG. Bound by self-destructive pursuits driven by pleasure, they move between metropolises while grappling with grief, betrayal, and discrimination. The game probes ethical choices around power shifts from international travel amid histories of war, genocide, and colonial occupation.
Players spend 3-4 hours across three modes: poetic interactive fiction, visual novel banter, and point-and-click travel stories. Hand-drawn images blend with real oil paintings, digitally illustrated backgrounds, and cute manga-style sprites. This adaptation suits fans of narrative-driven RPGs seeking introspective tales of young adulthood's messy, imperfect queer journeys.
STAMPED: AN ANTI-TRAVEL GAME follows the journeys of six young, queer and racialized travelers whose paths intersect across Asian urban landscapes. Bound by pleasure-fueled self-destruction, the group flounders from one metropolis to another, confronting the mixture of grief, betrayal, and discrimination that caused them to travel in the first place.
STAMPED features 3-4 hours of playtime through three game modes: poetic interactive fiction, visual novel banter, and point-and-click travel stories. The art style is a mixture of hand-drawn images, real oil paintings, digitally illustrated backgrounds, and of course, incredibly cute manga-style sprites.
STAMPED is an adaptation of the novel of (nearly) the same name, Stamped: an anti-travel novel, which won the 2020 Creative Prose Book Award at the Association of Asian American Studies. Like the book, the game's six travelers are faced with ethical decisions concerning the shifts in power that can come with international travel and dwelling within histories of war, genocide, and colonial occupation. STAMPED asks how the excursions of young adulthood can shape our queer, messy and imperfect selves.
Made with support from Analgesic Productions and the University of British Columbia.
