This article originally ran in Back Alley Games Issue 21, December 2025

One of horror’s greatest strengths is its ability to mirror societal anxieties and force its audience to come to terms with the real horrors that surround them. Many scholars and critics have written pages upon pages about the links between society and the horror it creates, forcing readers to consider that they themselves could be the true monster.

And then there’s Linguini’s Mansione.

This project, created by Nat Quayle Nelson, is a boss rush featuring beautiful pixel graphics and a story that bears absolutely no resemblance to any real politically motivated assassination trials that may or may not be currently ongoing at the time of writing.

Players take control of Linguine Macaroni; an Italian farmer accused of murdering a CEO. Once acquitted, now stuck in a mansion-based trap created by a group of billionaires intent on taking him down. Macaroni must defeat the three bosses keeping him trapped in order to escape and rid the world of some of the 1%.

This project began as a first-person shooter, then was tightened into a boss rush in order to highlight the setup and the villains. Nelson said their dream was to make it a full, Wolfenstein-style shooter, but that they became more concerned with having a final product at the end of the jam rather than crunching to make that dream a reality.

“I wasn’t going to let myself crunch to fix every bug and obsess over game balance,” they said. “The game ended up hitting all the beats I wanted to, but not looking very good and probably being too hard.”

Nelson goes on to say that they cringe when seeing people trying to figure the game out, but that they feel overall satisfied with their process. The project was made in Godot, and according to Nelson, it was the smoothest time they had ever had with the engine.

They spent four weeks on the game, with the first dedicated to the intro, the next focused on combat and core gameplay, and the third and fourth spent creating and fleshing out the boss fights. That time frame was deliberately created to cut down on crunch, but led to a product that Nelson felt was unpolished.

However, gameplay was never the main focus of this project. Nelson stressed that the idea they entered development with: a violent, satire-fueled spin on Luigi’s Mansion, was the most important part of Linguine’s Mansione.

“Sometimes violence is the answer,” they said. “For example, when the working class is fully separated from the surplus value of our labor, can’t even access health care, and are basically forced to turn the gears of a massive capitalist death cult.”

They also stress the importance of collective building in the face of an increasingly bleak future fueled by corporate oligarchs and hostile tech monopolies, pointing directly to the No Tech for Apartheid movement as one of their favorite recent developments in the gaming space.

Nelson goes on to state that the goal of their work is to inspire resistance in their players and to shift the Overton window to a more progressive place. Or put another way, game development as a form of political resistance.

Making real change through video games may seem far-fetched, but we here at Back Alley think it’s a worthy goal.

Linguine’s Mansione can be played here: https://nqn.itch.io/linguinis-mansione
You can support Nat’s other work on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/blades_itch_edition