When I recently spoke to Stellar Jockeys lead artist Jack Monahan and lead designer Hugh Monahan about Brigador Killers, a big focus for me was approachability versus depth. Most of my favorite games are super-crusty and complex RPGs or immersive sims, and the studios that made them—Troika, Looking Glass, Obsidian, to name a few—often found sustained financial success difficult or impossible.
You need some level of mainstream buy-in to keep the lights on, but something that's too focus-tested or homogenized won't please anyone. Stellar Jockeys' first game, Brigador, is a hardcore mech sim that initially bombed sales-wise, but is now a cult classic, so the Monahans are well-positioned to comment on the subject.
I appreciated the philosophical stance they had toward people who bounce off Brigador and Killers. "We love our games, we're very in this world," said Jack, "But you only need to have an encounter with your mom or someone else's mom to realize none of this makes sense, and we're all speaking Greek all the time."
They see getting people to buy into it all as a design challenge, but don't begrudge the ones for whom it doesn't click. "We had a vtuber recently, she streamed...
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