“Starting to be able to use a PC was one of the signs that I was growing up,” says Xalavier Nelson Jr, founder and creative director of indie studio Strange Scaffold. The creator of games like El Paso Elsewhere and I Am Your Beast was first introduced to gaming via console, only occasionally playing Flash 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.”

The first PC game to stick in Nelson Jr’s brain was Sid Meier’s Pirates!, the 2004 remake of the 1987 piracy simulator. “I think [it’s] one of the most perfect examples of what a sandbox game can be,” he says. “It’s not concerned about getting a single, polished nugget of gameplay in your hands. It’s trying to compile this wider picture of what it means to be a pirate every layer.”

Starting his career as a journalist, Nelson Jr eventually moved into game development and founded 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 development, producing more than a dozen titles since 2021. Its most recent game is Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator, a sci-fi stock market speculation simulator where players gamble fortunes on the life progression of alien infants.

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?

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?

Blood! So a big thing for me is knowing the history of my medium and directly comparing different parts of its history. So juggling Cultic and going back to Blood: Fresh Supply—shout out to Nightdive—is really good for the brain, and it helps you appreciate ways that games have advanced.

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 game.

I had managed to get a cheap copy of it through a Humble Bundle or something, and we would play it for hours and hours and hours and find strategies and ways to fuck with each other and ideal ways of moving through a map. And being able to drill down on a game that deep is something I miss from my childhood. It’s the game you play the most because it’s the game you have.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

I’d say the game I will never fully uninstall is Warframe. I mean, no matter how much I play it, the ways it reveals itself and it evolves over time, and the galaxy-brain skill of the people who worked on it, it just remains endlessly compelling. I’m extremely happy that something like that exists and is a live-service game that feels like it respects my time as a player. So every device I have, I find a way to install Warframe on it and it sticks around because I know when I go back it will be worth it.

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?

I think it’s Audacity. I voice act. I’m the lead actor on the upcoming Hellraiser Revival game. So for the purposes of my games and the games of others, editing some audio or recording something or—as we find an opportunity—hopping into the booth for something quick, I adore Audacity. It’s one of the first things I install anytime I get a new PC.

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.