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Disk Cleanup
Welcome to Disk Cleanup, our common weekend column delving into the PCs of PC gaming luminaries. Come again each weekend to learn a brand new interview, digging into the essential questions, like “How tidy is your desktop?” and “What game will you never uninstall?”
“Starting to be able to use a PC was one of the signs that I was growing up,” says Xalavier Nelson Jr, founder and artistic director of indie studio Strange Scaffold. The creator of video games like El Paso Elsewhere and I Am Your Beast was first launched to gaming through console, solely sometimes taking part in Flash video games on PC. “One of my first PC game memories is not the games I was allowed to play, but the games I wasn’t allowed to play, watching my dad play Battlefield 2 and Age of Empires on a desktop PC.”
Starting his profession as a journalist, Nelson Jr ultimately moved into sport improvement and based Strange Scaffold, releasing its debut title—An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs—in 2017. Since then, Strange Scaffold has embarked upon an impressively prolific run of improvement, producing greater than a dozen titles since 2021. Its most up-to-date sport is Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator, a sci-fi stock market speculation simulator where players gamble fortunes on the life progression of alien infants.
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Nelson Jr stopped shorting babies on the intergalactic stock market to guide me through the games installed on his PC, where we battled not one but two evil cults, and made two forays into outer space.
What game are you currently playing?
I’m playing a lot of Cultic. Specifically, Chapter Two.
Cultic is a good game. It has a very unique vibe, and it establishes its voice clearly. And Cultic Chapter 2 is the sequel to Cultic in the form of a DLC, in the ways that it uses that technology base and the learnings from player feedback to exponentially elaborate in new directions on what a Cultic game can be, and things inspired by Build engine type projects. It’s magical, and I keep coming back to it, even when it kicks me in the face.
What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?
Xalavier Nelson Jr
Xalavier Nelson Jr is a prolific game developer and founder of Strange Scaffold, known for its fascinating, experimental games and short development cycles. Before getting into game dev, Nelson Jr was a journalist, with his byline frequently appearing on this very site where he wrote, among other things, his Inside Dev column.
It’s Outriders. It’s still installed. I played Outriders years ago and it stuck in my brain as an interesting game. I wanted to see what it would have to say and do next, I just never came back [to it]. So me and a couple of friends recently made a blood pact to get through Outriders and it was a brilliant time.
It swings between tones wildly. You can see the scars and marks of how they tried to reconcile this massive project and make it work. As a developer, seeing all the pieces that feel like “Oh this was supposed to be more expanded” or “This system likely had an entire other set of things that depended upon it that were adjusted at some point in development”—it just increases the charm of this flawed, beautiful game for us. And that makes me all the more sad about the recent cancellation news for the sequel, because I think that game would have been really special.
It’s wild. It reintroduces itself roughly eight times, and [part] of the magic of playing is going “Wait a second, what do you mean?” as they change and alter and retcon pieces of the lore in real time. Many of them are terrifying existential crises that the game refuses to engage with further, except for when it does.
And it’s very funny when it does, because very often it’s just your character in what appears to be full mocap, look[ing] at someone and squinting, and the handheld camera just holding on them for a good four seconds. And then the cutscene ends! It’s awkward and beautiful and weird in a way that, when people talk about what makes a good game, that type of emotional rollercoaster that can be created by flawed tech and interesting choices is not included in that criteria, and it makes more games worse.
What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?
And in some ways, for me at least, I play a spiritual successor, [then] I go back to the original and I’m like “Oh, people think that this is explored territory because this game came out that was a spiritual successor and was super successful.” But there’s an entire other angle of the experience it was echoing that they didn’t touch on and still remains as fruitful and worthy ground to explore as a developer. Uncovering treasure troves like that is exhilarating.
What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?
The highest number of legitimate hours, I would say, is Worms: Crazy Golf. It was me and my sister’s childhood sport.
I had managed to get an affordable copy of it by way of a Humble Bundle or one thing, and we’d play it for hours and hours and hours and discover methods and methods to fuck with one another and ultimate methods of transferring by way of a map. And with the ability to drill down on a sport that deep is one thing I miss from my childhood. It’s the sport you play probably the most as a result of it is the sport you may have.
What sport will you by no means, ever uninstall?
I’ve gotten to the point where there’s moral choices. I chopped off a man’s head. I believe the latest quest I cleared is, yeah, it’s The War Within. When it pulled out a black and white karma system out of nowhere, I did an audible cheer.
What’s a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn’t live without?
How tidy is your desktop screen?
I keep it very tidy. I have my Recycle Bin. I have the app and the Nvidia app and the GOG Galaxy app. I will usually have one of my latest either contract or audio exports in a few critical text files. I try to do my task tracking via some very simple Notepad ++ documents. But they’re all organised in a line, there’s about 8 icons lined up.
One of the most interesting things is I have a finished game that I haven’t released publicly. There’s so many other things to launch and to talk about that I’ve done with my teams, the final interactive fiction game that I did, I finished years ago and just never really had a good time to debut because at that point my career was moving onto other things. It’s just sitting there so that one day, when things are a little more quiet, I can put that into the world, and put [in] a little bit of time to shine it up before I do.
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