Some gaming stories are difficult to explain without sounding as though someone has mixed three browser tabs together and shaken them violently. This week’s roundup manages exactly that: anime racing liveries, a troubled character reveal in Love and Deepspace, a baffling puzzle from a long-forgotten adventure game, the eternal misery of ladders, and an unexpectedly threatening phone call about a man living a “low poly mess.”
That combination is the appeal of The Sunday Papers. Rather than focus on one major release or announcement, the column gathers the most entertaining and thought-provoking games writing from across the web, then connects it all with a deliberately chaotic narrative. The result is part reading list, part comedy sketch, and part reminder that the games industry is much stranger than its marketing departments usually admit.
When horse girls and virtual idols reach the starting grid
The roundup opens with a wonderfully specific piece of motorsport trivia: a car competing in Japan’s Super GT GT300 category carries sponsorship from Umamusume Pretty Derby, the horse-girl game built around racing, training, and idol culture. It is joined on the circuit by a Mercedes associated with Hatsune Miku, giving the field an unusually strong connection to Japanese character franchises and rhythm-game fandom.
There is something uniquely entertaining about seeing a game property escape its usual promotional spaces and appear on a real racing machine. A racing livery is not merely an advertisement; it becomes part of the visual identity of the event. The drivers, pit crews, and commentators have to share the same physical space with characters who were originally designed for menus, collectible cards, music videos, and gacha banners.
The column’s imagined conversation between the drivers is, of course, absurd. It also captures the oddity of modern cross-promotion. Somewhere between esports branding, anime fandom, and conventional sponsorship, these collaborations have created a world where a horse-girl game and a virtual pop star can compete for attention at the same corner of a race track.
Love and Deepspace and the danger of a controversial character reveal
The tone shifts sharply with a look at the backlash surrounding Valko, a planned addition to Love and Deepspace. According to the source article, criticism from sections of the game’s existing fanbase focused on concerns that established love interests were being sidelined, alongside objections to Valko’s visual design and characterization.
The situation reportedly escalated well beyond ordinary online complaints. The article describes claims that hostile items, including cow manure and funeral wreaths, were sent to Infold’s offices. It also discusses reports of Chinese officials becoming involved after players allegedly identified references to historical atrocities committed by Japan against China in deleted game files, as well as sexually threatening behavior associated with Valko’s introductory material.
These details should be treated as reported allegations rather than independently verified facts within the roundup itself. Even so, the broader lesson is clear: character-driven live-service games can develop communities with an intense sense of ownership. A new character is not received as a simple content update when players have spent months or years building emotional attachments to an existing cast.
Infold’s reported reliance on broad apologies rather than detailed explanations only appears to have made the situation more difficult. In a live-service game, communication is part of the product. When a publisher refuses to clearly explain what changed, what went wrong, or what it intends to do next, players are left to fill the gaps themselves—and the resulting speculation is rarely charitable.
Bad puzzles, worse ladders, and the hidden complexity of games
The column then swings back toward comedy with a discussion of The Odyssey, an adventure game from 2012. The imagined criticism centers on an especially strange puzzle involving a fish, a talking bird, statuettes, constellations, and a player’s apparent failure to understand that throwing away food delivered by a god might not be the intended solution.
It is the kind of puzzle design that feels clever from the inside and baffling from the outside. Adventure games often ask players to accept chains of logic that would be rejected instantly in any real-world situation. The joke works because most players have encountered at least one puzzle where the correct answer was not “what makes sense,” but “what combination of unrelated objects did the designer secretly have in mind?”
That leads into one of the roundup’s strongest subjects: ladders. Designer Liz England’s discussion of “The Door Problem” explains why ordinary objects become surprisingly difficult to implement in games. A door needs rules for solidity, collision, direction, interaction, animation, camera positioning, and whether it should open into the player’s face. A ladder introduces an entirely different movement state, with its own bugs and restrictions.
The point is more serious than the profanity aimed at ladders suggests. Games simplify reality constantly, but every simplification still requires a system underneath. Players see a ladder and understand its purpose immediately. Developers must determine exactly how the character enters it, moves along it, exits it, reacts to interruptions, uses weapons near it, and recovers if the animation breaks. The more “natural” an object feels, the easier it is to overlook the work required to make it behave naturally.
A delivery driver, a mysterious phone call, and one very strange ending
The final section abandons even the appearance of a conventional roundup. A delivery driver becomes the subject of an escalating internal monologue, beginning with an ill-advised search about whether delivery workers are allowed to use a customer’s toilet. It is a tiny moment of everyday awkwardness that gradually becomes more stressful than any of the preceding stories.
Then comes the phone call. A driver answers, only to hear a rant about Tom Orry and his supposedly “low poly” life. The box is abandoned, the drivers attempt to return to work, and the entire incident appears ready to disappear into the background—until Hatsune Miku Racing driver Nobuteru Taniguchi discovers Adrian Edmondson sitting in the wrong car.
The closing gag is intentionally ridiculous, but it fits the column’s larger argument about games writing. The best pieces do not always need to stay inside the boundaries of release news or formal criticism. They can examine a live-service controversy, explain why doors are hard to design, mock a terrible puzzle, or simply turn a racing sponsorship into an elaborate imaginary scene.
What ties the collection together is curiosity. Games are built from systems, but they are experienced through stories, communities, frustrations, jokes, and strange cultural collisions. This week’s selections find all of those things in places where most players might not think to look—and then leave the reader wondering whether ladders, delivery drivers, or virtual horse girls are the real final boss.
Sources
rockpapershotgun.com
