The SuperDQP Weekly - April 28, 2025

I’ve written about depression more broadly in the past, but today I want to zero in on executive dysfunction and how it pertains to my gaming hobby. If you’ve ever told yourself “I’ve been meaning to get to that,” this newsletter is for you.

A quick wishlist recommendation first

(I’m melding the game and wishlist recs for future newsletters into one either/or at the beginning. There’s your housekeeping update.)

One of my first thoughts during the initial Switch 2 leak period, reading about the new Joy-con’s mouse functionality, was “I bet they could make a wicked WarioWare out of that.” And I have no doubt that they eventually will, but for now, the best that Switch 2 owners will have in 2025 is that (bafflingly paid) hardware tech demo and a (slightly less bafflingly paid) software update for Super Mario Party Jamboree, and that’s for people who are sure they’ll even be able to get a hold of a Switch 2 in 2025 in the first place. Me personally, I’m not counting on it.

So I’ll have to make do with MINDWAVE instead.

That sounds dismissive. MINDWAVE‘s demo absolutely rules, capturing WarioWare’s chaotic energy with an MTV animation tinge and fun interpretations of mouse and keyboard controls reminiscent of the ways that WarioWare: Smooth Moves exploited the Wii’s controller.

It’s vibrantly compelling stuff, and if you have a computer to play the demo on, I highly recommend doing so.

MINDWAVE will release on Windows PC via Steam. A demo is currently available. Release date TBA.

Executive function machine broke

Nearly ten years ago, a friend urged me to try a new, humble little indie game called Undertale.

Undertale would eventually wind up being one of my favorite games of all time. Its small budget belies a gigantic heart; weaving a narrative of violence and non-violence with characters that I absolutely fell in love with. The pacifist route’s ending makes my heart sing even to this day.

But you already knew all that. A less culturally-ubiquitous story that I like to tell about Undertale is that, ironically, it took me a pretty long time to get around to it. I bought it about a month after it launched and played it even later.

I could make the excuse that 2015 was a banner year in video games and I was, at the time, sucked into a lot of them. Fallout 4 had just released around that time, and I was also playing The Witcher III and trying to play the abysmal PC port of Batman: Arkham Knight.

But the truth is, I never finished any of those three games. I dropped Fallout 4 after my seventh Preston Garvey quest made me realize the futility of my existence. I dropped Arkham Knight after realizing that hunting Riddler trophies wasn’t worth the pain I was putting my poor computer at the time through.

I dropped Witcher III, ironically, just as it was getting good, and I could tell at the time that it was getting good. It was not long after the excellent Bloody Baron quest. There was no “snap” the way there was with Fallout 4 or Arkham Knight. But in retrospect, its open-world design kind of grated on me after a while, and to this day I simply feel no compulsion to return to it.

I finally got off my ass and played Undertale some three months after all of my colleagues at university had thoroughly discussed and analyzed it front to back to front. It was so pervasive that students in 400-level literature classes that I didn’t even know played video games were talking about its themes as if it were another book we were reading.

And it was worth it! I love Undertale and still do. But this wasn’t the last time this exact thing happened to me.

Less than two years later, after dumping a boatload of time into The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, I played through Nier: Automata and was similarly blown away.

Mapping this phenomenon to a longer timeline, I first played Yakuza 0 almost three years after several friends from different circles gushed to me about it. Putting it on an even longer timeline, I had a translated copy of Mother 3 sitting around for over a decade before I finally played it a year ago. Both of these games were profound, for me.

(We’ll get to Mother 3 in a later newsletter, don’t worry.)

There are other games that remain unplayed that I just know will be resonant obsessions if only I summon the willpower to just play them. STALKER. Bloodborne. Hypnospace Outlaw. Basically any Dragon Quest game.

So why don’t I just play them?

I could come up with any number of excuses. Exciting game X is about to come out. I’m not in the right headspace. Work, along with our current sociopolitical climate, has left me exhausted.

For Dragon Quest XI in particular, when I first tried it, I assigned the male-only protagonist my current name and just about threw my Steam Deck out the window when the game kept using masculine pronouns. Dragon Quest may have the kind of whimsy I’m looking for, but the main character’s arc is often rigidly heteronormative.

I’d love to give it another try. I used a different name (“Buck Bumble,” at a friend’s suggestion) for the male-only player character in Metaphor: ReFantazio, and I could easily do the same for Dragon Quest. But I just don’t have the will. And at the end of the day, despite all the excuses, willpower really is the root cause.

This month (April 2025) has been an absolute cornucopia of interesting game releases of every budget. I’ve mentioned REPOSE in a previous newsletter as a game whose demo absolutely spellbound me. And Peppered looks right up my alley, considering how much I gushed about Undertale at the top of the page.

And yet, when I downloaded all these cool games onto my Steam Deck and picked one to start on my lunch break, which one did I actually pick out?

Disney Villains Cursed Café. Likely the most boring game I’ve bought all month.

Don’t get me wrong, a game like VA-11 Hall-A or Coffee Talk with a cast of Disney villains is a killer elevator pitch. And the writing is pretty fun! But it is by far the most milquetoast of all the games I’ve bought this year so far, and I knew that going in. Disney’s not going to be able to compete with something like Blue Prince on the creativity front.

And yet, that’s what made me pick it. Something in my soul needed something boring and safe, just like it did when I initially slept on Undertale in favor of Fallout.

I’ve talked about this in a previous newsletter: how in times of extreme stress, the best art to play or watch is the stuff that goes down easy. And these are stressful times; just as stressful (if not more so) than they were when I wrote that newsletter.

It’s left me extremely prone to executive dysfunction, the feeling of wanting or needing to do a thing but just not being able to muster the willpower to do so. The feeling that leaves dirty dishes stacking in the sink, or basic household maintenance problems unsolved. It applies to entertainment and art, too.

Blue Prince is brilliant, for example, but my brain is under too much pressure to fully grasp its biggest mysteries. (And I’m also admittedly on the side of the internet discourse that dislikes the game’s reliance on RNG. Justifying that opinion would take an entire other newsletter, though.)

So here I am, serving tea to Maleficent and helping Jafar get into cryptocurrency. (It doesn’t make much more sense in context. In my defense, both Cruella de Vil and I know it's a scam and we're both laughing at his expense.)

I imagine that months from now, when I finally do play Peppered or REPOSE or even something older like Void Stranger, my memories of Disney Villains Cursed Café will have well receded to the back of my brain’s “filler” folder while I dedicate more thought and energy to them, and I’ll think, “Damn. Why didn’t I play those sooner?"

But I suppose, in stressful times, this is the nature of the beast. But I don’t want to end this on a fatalistic note, so I’ll do something trite and propose that you make a comment!

What’s your experience with executive dysfunction and media? Do you struggle with it now? Maybe by sharing some wisdom, we can return to this topic later and have a more fruitful look at it.

(And I know my newsletter’s audience is small enough that I could probably just get away by saying “feel free to DM me wherever” without fear of flooding my inbox. So feel free to DM me wherever.)