The Unstoppable Rise of Strange Scaffold

push to talk #6 // feat. the 26-year-old running the Blumhouse of games

This week’s issue digs deeply into Strange Scaffold, the ambitious and prolific indie studio founded by 26-year-old creative auteur Xalavier Nelson Jr.

More on that below the fold. First, this week's spiciest games industry news.

Scuttlebutt and Slackery

The week’s most-shared, oft-Slacked, and spiciest games industry news links.

• Rumors Swirl about a Multiplatform Future for Xbox - The rumor mill churned all week long: Xbox franchises like Gears of War might come to PlayStation. Also maybe Starfield? And Sea of Thieves? And Hi-Fi Rush? By midweek, owners of Xbox consoles were starting to wonder: why do I own this thing instead of a PlayStation? In a tweet, Xbox head Phil Spencer declined to squash the rumors, attempting to punt the discussion to next week. The comms team at Xbox has gotta be grumpy right now—this feels like an avoidable debacle. (Xbox Era)

• Legendary Games VCs Dish on the State of Game Funding - Over the years I’ve mostly fallen out of love with podcasts and turned toward audiobooks, but I re-installed my Overcast app for the Gamecraft podcast. The show’s first season is a sort of standalone “history of the games business” which I found fascinating. The second season puts the focus on the modern era of the biz and features some incredibly spicy real-talk about the state of the industry from co-hosts Mitch Lasky and Blake Robbins. Listen to S02E02 “Choose Your (ad)Venture.” You’ll see what I mean. (Gamecraft)

• The King of England Owns Half the Rights to the Discworld Point-and-Click Adventure Game - This excellent feature story about the history of games based on Terry Pratchett’s works also contained this hilarious nugget: “Whenever something closes in the UK, intellectual property rights revert 50% to the original creator and 50% to the crown, which is King Charles. So that’s the two owners of the games.” So the Discworld remake might happen, but only if the royal family approves. Weird country! (Time Extension)

• Layoffs at Crash Bandicoot Makers Toys for Bob - The 86 job cuts at Toys for Bob seem to have been part of the previously-reported ~1,900 cuts across Activision-Blizzard-Xbox properties. The studio’s future is in question since, as later reporting revealed, the studio’s offices in San Francisco will close. I suspect we’ll see more stories like this as the fallout from January’s mass layoffs becomes more apparent. (Engadget)

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The Unstoppable Rise of Strange Scaffold

What causes a games studio to succeed over the long term? 

Ask ten developers this question and you'll get as many different answers: 

• a high quality bar

• artistic vision

• leadership with a growth mindset

• social media savvy

• deep understanding of the audience

• consistent releases

• a sustainable approach to development

• and the classic: "Just make great games!"

All these factors are relevant for success over the long term. Though, of course, none guarantee success by themselves.

But what if, hypothetically, you were to find a game developer that exhibited all of these qualities, all at once?

You'd have to imagine they'd be unstoppable. 

This brings us to the story of Strange Scaffold and its 26-year-old founder, Xalavier Nelson Jr.

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Strange Studio

On the contrary, Strange Scaffold keeps getting better.

Since 2020, Strange Scaffold has developed and released 11 games. Of the 7 titles available on Steam, all boast positive or "very positive" review averages—and, thanks to what founder and studio head Xalavier Nelson Jr. calls "extremely precise" production schedules and a consistent artistic approach, nearly all have turned a profit. "People play one game we have, and then they buy the rest," he says.

It’s a legitimate indie game success story, and increasingly, the industry is taking notice. Nelson has won over journalists and award committees with thoughtful interviews and a slate of games that demand attention. Mainstream media outlets have interviewed him about the studio's unusual "constellation" production model, which sees a rotating cast of contractors joining forces with Nelson on each of his projects.

And the studio's latest title, El Paso, Elsewhere is currently one of five finalists nominated for "Outstanding Achievement for an Independent Game" at the 27th Annual D.I.C.E. Awards. 

Over the last couple of weeks, I've dug deeply into the studio’s approach, played through its entire catalog on Steam, and interviewed Nelson. 

And after all that, my takeaway is this:

This guy is actually cookin'

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To understand Strange Scaffold's potential, it's best to start with its latest release: 

El Paso, Elsewhere (2023)

I could try to explain the game's plot, but just check out this trailer instead:

Basically, it's a Max Payne style slow-mo third-person shooter with a wild visual style that combines aesthetic elements from old and newer eras of games. The lighting, in particular, feels very modern, as does the heavy-breathing voiceover, led by Nelson himself, who does an excellent job voicing El Paso, Elsewhere's main character. 

Other aspects are intentionally anachronistic. The game's cinematic sequences often pull the camera in close on characters whose faces are a smear of un-animated pixels—like if an original PlayStation game enabled RTX. On paper, it shouldn't work, but in practice it's electrifying. Instead of trying to carry the game's character models across the uncanny valley, Nelson and team simply turn back at the cliff's edge and venture into the dark woods offered by the past. 

"We wanted to mix older aesthetic principles with the lushness of modern technology—particularly with the way we used light," Nelson says. 

Nelson's presence infuses more than just the game's voiceover. El Paso, Elsewhere's soundtrack contains a complete hip-hop concept album written and performed by Nelson in collaboration with musician and sound designer rj lake. The duo formed a new act for the project, called LAKE SAVAGE, for which Nelson raps under the name "Chad Shakespeare," a reference to a recurring character (often a talking dog) from other Strange Scaffold games. 

Chad Shakespeare in Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator

I originally reached out to Nelson after listening through the album on Spotify because I had to ask him: Is El Paso, Elsewhere a game with a soundtrack, or a hip-hop album with a game? 

"We did not want to do what we ended up doing for the game," Nelson said, laughing. "The project was supposed to have instrumental music—which would have reduced a lot of overhead. But at a certain point, we were making tracks for the game, and a few of them worked, but a lot of them didn't, and we didn't know why. I had experience writing songs and raps from the past. So we said we'll make an album."

TL;DR, the game rules. Everything about it rules.

But there are more games to talk about. Let me quickly summarize a few of the best and most interesting titles in the Strange Scaffold catalog:

Sunshine Shuffle (2023)

I’m gonna just quote the Steam description for this one in full: “Play cards with a group of adorable animal friends who robbed the largest bank on the Eastern Seaboard 12 years ago, and are willing to let you decorate their boat in return for not being executed by the mafia.”

All of that is not only accurate, but kind of underselling it? It's basically Poker Night at the Inventory with an interesting narrative twist: You play Texas Hold 'Em against five AI animal opponents who—via Animal Crossing-style dialogue bubbles—gradually reveal an elaborate backstory about a botched bank robbery that they took part in. They're telling you all this because you've been sent by "the mafia" to interrogate them. 

When I played, I won my first three tournaments in a row. I asked Nelson whether this means I'm a god at Texas Hold 'Em or if he just kinda tuned the game to be winnable, and his answer was "kinda both." 

Witch Strandings (2022)

Maybe the hardest-to-explain game in the Strange Scaffold catalog, and probably the most niche as well, with only 28 reviews on Steam as of this writing. The game is open about being directly inspired by Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding (Nelson calls it a "Strand-like"), and it features mouse controls that are intentionally tuned to make you physically sweep your mouse in large arcs just to navigate your cursor/character around the world as you gather resources to help feed and nurture weird little forest animals. 

I can't stress how weird and arty this one feels. The game draws your attention to the mouse as a device by requiring your actual, physical labor just to maneuver around the environment. The strangeness of this design led to the game getting press coverage that was positive but also a bit reserved in its praise. I consider it to be an underrated gem.

Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator (2021)

It's kind of a menu-navigation text adventure game about the stock market? Except you're trading organs. This one was really popular with content creators and, despite the insane name and premise, actually feels like the most "classic" PC game experience in the Strange Scaffold catalog. 

The game itself is great, but the soundtrack (again produced by rj lake) is unbeatable. When you're in-game, the music dynamically builds on itself in layers based on the buttons you click in the menus, so the official "companion album" on Spotify and Bandcamp is sort of a separate creative production using the component sounds from the game. Just listen to this.

An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs (2021)

Nelson calls An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs "the best game we've made," and while I found the writing to be absolutely hilarious, it feels more like a comedy art installation than a game. 

Plot summary: You are in a long-distance relationship with the only other remaining human in the universe, and you are going to have to say goodbye to her eventually. In the meantime, you must navigate various airports which are currently being run by… not really DOGS per se so much as rotating JPEGS of dogs. 

Nelson says the game (which he refers to using the shorthand "dog airport game") "would have sold more copies likely if we used 3D models. But it would not have been as good of a game, and it would not have been as magical for the people who played it."

I definitely do recommend buying this one. You can play through the entire thing in an hour or so (as some YouTubers have). 

The High Strangeness of Process

The particular sense of humor underlying the games I've described above could mislead you into not taking Strange Scaffold seriously. 

I was describing Sunshine Shuffle to a friend, and his reaction was that "it sounds like something out of a random game description generator." Like, smash a button on a website, and out comes "Texas Hold 'Em with Animal Crossing characters who have committed a bank robbery." 

On one level, this is fair—you could certainly say the same thing about An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs or Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator, but in each case the outward silliness of these games belies a sincere and interesting experiment combining narrative storytelling techniques with recognizable gameplay patterns.

El Paso, Elsewhere is about how love transforms us, even when we try to bury it deep. Sunshine Shuffle is about the risks we take in life, and how we deal with the fallout when luck isn't in our favor. An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs is about navigating long-distance relationships and balancing competing priorities. In each case, there's a deep resonance between the game mechanics and the narrative that picks at your emotions and leaves you feeling weirdly raw.

Check out this YouTube commenter's reaction to a playthrough of An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs: 

The games aren't jokes, or randomly-generated gags. They're pulling off something real, and I can't name any other studio besides Strange Scaffold that's doing something like this so consistently—like, seriously, they're doing it every six months.

Something easy to miss in a prestige media environment is the power of the absurd. The absurd, pulpy, and dramatic gives us access to an emotional spectrum that we are otherwise incapable of reaching. I think often about how John Carpenter believes that Escape from LA is a better film than Escape from New York—and the more I access the space myself, the more I realize that he’s right.
–Xalavier Nelson Jr.

And so it probably shouldn't be so surprising that when you speak to Xalavier Nelson Jr. about his strange studio, the main thing he wants to talk about is his process—the way Strange Scaffold works and its philosophical approach to game development that allows the studio to produce genuinely good, interesting, well-received games at this level of speed and consistency. 

"When you see a name on the credits for a Strange Scaffold game," Nelson explains, "they might have been part of the whole dev cycle, or they might have worked on one thing. But the thing they did was likely precisely planned ahead of time to fit a specific role on the project—a specific need that the project would have—well in advance. And that means that for all the people who I get to collaborate with, we try to offer them the most interesting, fairly compensated, flexible work possible."

The result, Nelson says, is that with a small, part-time team, Strange Scaffold can afford to "ship ambitious incredible things that players deserve to play." And, he stresses, for each game, the studio can scale up or down and adopt processes that match the scale of the game. 

Much of this focus on process, for Nelson, is due to his longstanding concern for the way the mainstream games industry tends to burn people out. Over time, he says, "you see people drop away. I get tired of seeing my peers crushed under the wheels of unsustainable processes."

I have to admit, it's a little surprising to see an independent developer care so much about this topic, given that so many of us who've worked at large developers tend to accept the status quo. And that status quo, of course, is that I’ve never worked with a leader in games capable of giving an accurate timeline for their projects. I’m not being facetious: whenever any developer tells me their release timeline, I mentally add at least 50% more time to their estimate—that's at least how long it'll actually take.

And this is normal, right? It's just how things get done in games—we tell ourselves sweet lies about how fast we’ll work and shrug when they don't come true.

Nelson has a problem with this.

"Even if a game sells a million copies," he says, "if it was two years late and went $3 million over budget, there was still a failure of process that occurred."

It doesn't have to be this way, Nelson says. Instead, we could be making "precisely-shaped" games. And he doesn’t try to claim that Strange Scaffold is the only one getting it right. Within the games industry, he namedrops both Epic Games and Supergiant Games as studios that don't get enough credit for their approach to game development. 

Particularly with Supergiant, Nelson says, "everybody loves them and speaks about them in glowing terms. And their games have inspired a lot of copying-of-homework. But no one is looking at or crediting their priorities and values and how that results in very precise production schedules. We're missing the opportunity to fully learn from our peers, because we're looking at the things they generate more than we're looking at the methods that generate them. If you build processes that reflect your values, you get to produce games with a speed and efficiency that seems impossible."

Nelson also points outside of games for inspiration.

"Blumhouse Film is regularly producing movies efficiently and precisely," he says. "It's about taking consistent swings to achieve consistent sustainable results, so you can bear a loss but also achieve success far beyond your apparent means." 

So what's next for Strange Scaffold?

This shouldn't shock you: more games, including at least one coming this year, called Life Eater, which Nelson describes as "a horror fantasy kidnapping sim about a druid living in modern-day suburbia who sacrifices multiple people a year to delay the end of the world on the behalf of a god that he isn't sure exists."

Halfway through this pitch I'm laughing, and even Nelson cracks a smile as he puts on his marketing hat and finishes his pitch:

"I know that the horror fantasy kidnapping sim is a very crowded genre but we're hoping to make a big impact and show what we can do in that space."

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That’s all we’ve got today, dear gamers. Please like, subscribe, then print this issue out, duct tape it to a rock, and throw it through a coworker’s car window with an attached note that says “subscribe or die.”

See you next Friday.