Such is the breathless cadence of the modern video-game-release schedule — players barely get a chance to rest their poor thumbs these days. Sure, January was quiet, providing a welcome opportunity to enjoy some late-2024 gems (most notably Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl). February, on the contrary, was ludicrous, delivering a deluge of life-consuming experiences, from Civilization VII’s grand strategy soap opera to Kingdom Come: Deliverance II’s medieval RPG of beguiling, maddening detail.

The standout early releases of 2025 are those that exude greater focus: a melancholic sci-fi game brought to life through die-rolling chance, the thrill of seeing prehistoric behemoths roam a teeming fantasy realm. Most straightforward of all? A skiing game with no soundtrack but the audible crunch of pristine, compacted snow. Games often promise the world (and more); here, five that deliver an impressive and refreshing clarity of vision.

Monster Hunter Wilds

(PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X)

Scuttling insects, blooming plants, sporing mushrooms, and the biggest apex predators a video game has ever thrown at you. Monster Hunter Wilds is part Mesozoic-ecosystem simulation, part big-game hunting romp. The showdowns with its signature behemoths, including a lightning dragon named Rey Dau, are dynamic, desperate, and thrilling. Then, at the end of each fight, you carve up the fallen foe’s cadaver, plying the resources back into monster-festooned gear. More so than any game in the franchise since it began in 2004, the dissonant elements of Wilds harmonize: Your role as the dutiful protector of teeming environments is emphasized; you’re encouraged to understand ecological ebbs and flows. The resulting game evokes the bombast of Japanese kaiju movies, the wonder of prestige nature documentaries, and sometimes even the brutality of factory farming, all while remaining its own undeniably majestic beast.

Lost Records: Bloom & Rage

(PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X)

Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill, and the Cocteau Twins — the references in Lost Records: Bloom & Rage may ooze ’90s underground cool, but this narrative-adventure game is not aloof; it is strikingly sweet and earnest. There are shades of coming-of-age greats like Richard Linklater’s movies and Stand by Me in the small-town, summertime adventure that unfolds. But Lost Records’s strength lies in letting the player subtly shape the narrative, choosing what kind of person the awkward, amateur moviemaker Swann comes to be through dialogue choices, actions, and, crucially, what she chooses to film with her camera. Like a TikTok account presenting a vision of a woodsy Americana past, the beautifully textured world here is inviting. But it’s not sanitized: The ’90s was hardly an idyllic era, especially for teenage girls. Lost Records: Bloom & Rage has the emotional maturity to be honest about what it so clearly loves.

Keep Driving

(PC)

The essence of the road trip is more than a sense of unfettered freedom on miles of asphalt. It is the small rituals that accumulate into something more profound: conversations that veer between banal and cosmic, sustenance on sugary snacks and scalding cups of coffee, pulling into a gas station and filling up not a cent more than your bank balance allows. Keep Driving, which bills itself as a “management RPG,” understands all of this, conjuring a quintessential road-tripping experience from small decisions rather than actual driving (which is nearly all automated). Which hitchhikers will you pick up? What will you play on the car stereo? Crucially, will you call Mom or Dad to bail you out of a sticky situation? Above all, time seems to function differently while chugging through these scrolling parallax landscapes. That’s what this gently poetic game offers even more than money: the time and space to figure things out.

Citizen Sleeper 2

(PC, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series S/X)

Amid the twinkling stars of a far-distant galaxy, life grinds on. This sequel to a 2022 indie darling casts you as a Sleeper, a robot worker fleeing their gang-boss captor. It has the look and feel of a tabletop board game, shuttling you about locations on a galactic map where there are cyborg misfits to talk to and freelance gigs to pick up. But this is not a staid game; it bristles with life through achingly pretty prose and mechanics that drive home the precarious existence of its itinerant protagonist. With every heart-in-mouth die roll, and only a certain number of turns to play with until your pursuer finds you, this is a brilliantly tense sci-fi RPG. Yet failure of a particular task or major story beat does not spell game over but thrusts you into what could be an even more stressful situation. Out of the frying pan and into the cosmic abyss.

Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders

(PC, Xbox Series S/X)

Screenshots don’t do Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders justice. You have to see this skiing game in motion to understand its wondrous summoning of alpine landscapes: light that shifts subtly as the sun moves behind clouds, the vision-obstructing swirl of a heavy blizzard, the way your skis cut deeply into freshly fallen snow. Perhaps surprisingly, this stunningly rendered scenery is the site of a most conventional sports game, one of time trials, gear-unlocks, and bone-breaking crashes. But what might have been a brash extreme-sports experience in the hands of another developer is one of almost zenlike serenity in the hands of Berlin studio Megagon Industries. It is just you, the mountain, and whistling, icy wind.

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The words JOIN THE NEW WORLD SEXUAL ORDER flash across a screen, which is itself flanked by two long red banners depicting Jesus on the cross — his arms splayed out, his head hung, and his torso disappearing into the image of a veiny and thick penis. This does not faze any of the 700 or so people who are seated on tiered wooden platforms in front of the film, shoulder to shoulder in a cavernous concrete auditorium, waiting for what comes next. Most people are dressed unremarkably, with the jumpers, hats, and scarves they needed to weather the London chill draped over their legs. But under all that fabric are leather chaps and harnesses, rubber body suits and frilly underwear. A ball gag is dangling from one man’s neck. In front of me, a throuple that wouldn’t look out of place in an Anthropologie catalogue starts to get handsy, the girl in the middle giving the boys on either side of her a “we’re about to …” smirk. But they’d have to finish the 100-minute movie before the advertised sex party could begin.

The masses are huddled in the multilevel venue in Dalston for a movie premiere–cum-sex party. The movie is The Visitor, the latest film from 61-year-old Canadian queercore director Bruce LaBruce. Over the last 35-plus years, LaBruce has made movies that toe the line between cinema and pornography, or really smash both together into something else entirely — literalizing the sexual taboos that get us off with little narrative subtlety.

Take The Visitor, for example, about a Black refugee who washes up on the shore of the River Thames and moves in with a white upper-class family only to have sex with every single one of them — sometimes one-on-one, sometimes incestuously together. It’s arguably more vulgar than LaBruce’s Raspberry Reich, his “terrorist-chic” film from 2004 that features a left-wing gang in Berlin attempting to literally fuck their way toward revolution, pausing between sucking each other off to be lectured by their queer female leader about the necessity of carnal desire in overthrowing capitalism. But not as vulgar as Skin Flick (1999), in which neo-Nazis go on a bisexual rampage of sexual assault against an interracial, wealthy gay couple, and one of the skinheads comes on a copy of Mein Kampf.

“I always said that if I hadn’t become an artist and a filmmaker that I would’ve become a psychoanalyst,” LaBruce told me earlier that day, speaking from inside the South London office of A/POLITICAL, the nonprofit funder of the film. Seated a floor above the basement where much of the raunchy sex of The Visitor was shot, LaBruce is in his signature look — all black, huge sunglasses, cropped hair, a thousand rings on his fingers, a Bloody Mary in his hand.

LaBruce’s films are ludicrously graphic, every bodily fluid imaginable pouring out onto the screen. So I was surprised to encounter such a chaste crowd in Dalston. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been; I learned later that very few of his films have been protested or petitioned, though some have been banned from screening at film festivals. LaBruce points out that race play, incest, and fantasies of uniformed power are some of the most popular themes in pornography. His films, like psychoanalysis, simply take things people already desire and fear. He ultimately hopes giving cinematic space to these primal urges can convince audiences that the reason the world hates migrants and women and gay people is because we all really hate ourselves. “Sexual repression, if it’s not addressed,” LaBruce tells me, “it comes back in a monstrous form.”

I’ve seen a lot of independent gay movies, and I’ve watched as queerness has entered the mainstream thanks to Luca Guadagnino films and teen rom-coms like Heartstopper (one of Netflix’s most popular TV shows ever). Over the past year especially, I’ve become personally wary of the proliferation of queer cinema — namely, its lack of messiness. The people are often too pretty, the bodies are too perfect, the politics are too tidy, the romances aren’t complicated enough, and the sex isn’t weird. LaBruce says he’s a fan of the newer, more popular queer movies like Guadagnino’s (and Guadagnino is a fan of LaBruce). But I’m glad LaBruce feels no impulse to make something palatable to the masses. I want him to act as a bulwark against the flattening of queer sex. I want him to be proof that even as we gain acceptance, we can still be uncanny.

And so, when I heard that a year after its premiere at the Berlinale, LaBruce was planning on turning The Visitor’s London premiere into a sex party, I was excited. He teamed up with the popular European fetish-party promoters Klub Verboten. They found this venue — half-theater, half-dungeon — and they decided to see what would happen: How many would come for the movie, and how many would come for the sex?

Juju, a 48-year-old man in attendance wearing a kilt, a distinctively Scottish hat, and a leather harness, says he’s never seen a LaBruce film but that he’s been to six sex parties in the last year, and generally enjoys the feeling of safety he gets from being around queer people in this setting. Aisha, 25, wearing a short, black dress and standing next to her choke-collar-donning partner, says she’s never been to a sex party before, but had been meaning to go to one for a while and came to this one in particular because she liked what LaBruce said in an interview — about violence being so normalized in popular culture, while sex was still shunned. Fiyero, a 39-year-old originally from Italy, is here for the screening only, and therefore dressed in workaday clothes — jean jacket, jeans, T-shirt. He tells me that this event feels like a moment of resistance in a world turned increasingly conservative. The supposed political progress of the last several decades, he says, has been mostly overstated.

“People are still struggling to come out, people are still struggling walking hand in hand, just simple things,” he notes. “We’re not asking to fuck in the streets. That was what sexual liberation was about probably in the ’70s, but today we’re just looking for basic needs.”

In an age of “kink at pride” discourse and increasing puritanicalness, LaBruce actually is asking to fuck in the streets, and everywhere else. He’s 61 years old, and he’s perceived this shift Fiyero is outlining, in which queer movements have evolved from ones concerned with sexual liberation and solidarity with other radical movements to ones concerned with mainstream institutions like marriage and the military and queer people’s inclusion in those spaces. “You lose sight of the goals you initially had,” LaBruce tells me. “You become the enemy within.”

LaBruce calls himself more punk provocateur than revolutionary, but it’s obvious in watching his films that he does have a consistent message: repression leads to aggression, and attaining individual release can result in broader societal freedom. LaBruce likes toying with Freud’s idea of family romance in particular — that, as he put it, there are all these sexual tensions within the hermetically sealed unit of the nuclear family. In The Visitor, LaBruce views the titular character (played by drag and burlesque star Bishop Black) not as a destroyer of the British family but as a revealer of all the energy suppressed by their bourgeois, western life. The Visitor (none of the characters have names in the movie) represents not just the fear of migrants in the U.K. and every other western nation, but the result of real liberation — he is neither deeply unhappy nor sexually repressed.

“You have injected into the gray, damp emptiness that was my life the virus of homosexual vigor and youth,” the Father says to the Visitor at a dinner scene late in the film, which takes place right after the Father, the Visitor, and the Father’s son have a threesome, all taking turns penetrating one another. “With your sacred sex and your erotic and oedipal interventions, you have demolished a society founded on class violence, imperialism, slavery. You’ve shaken me to the core.”

In another kind of movie, this scene — in which characters explicitly remark upon the political stakes of their situation — might elicit groans from an audience. In a LaBruce film, and as a prelude to a sex party, it was met with applause that bounced off the 100-foot-tall ceiling. Perhaps it’s harder to think critically when most of your blood is no longer in your brain, or maybe the lack of oxygen makes you realize he’s right: The world, devoid of sex and the disorder it brings, is gray and damp and empty.

The last act of The Visitor is less horny. After fucking his way through the family, The Visitor moves out, in search of more people in need of sexual awakening. In the last scene of the film, the Father stands on a rock in the middle of a waterfall, naked, flaccid, alone, and screaming, shattered with desire. Without the Visitor there to electrify him, he is unable to do it on his own. The finale might be reflective of LaBruce’s own skepticism, specifically his disdain for large-scale movements that advocate for a tidy future and his preference for the ideas of French philosopher and poet Jean Genet.

“He would find a revolution going on in the world, whether it be the Palestinians or the Black Panthers, and go and support it, but the minute it showed any sign of being co-opted or institutionalized, he would not only abandon it, but turn against it,” LaBruce said. “Once you unleash that, then you just go on to the next revolution somewhere. So, in that way, revolution is perpetual.”

The Visitor credits start appearing onscreen in the Dalston auditorium, and the audience begins making its way down several dimly lit hallways and a few flights of stairs, before slowly trickling into a multi-room basement space, also dimly lit. Everyone lines up at coat check to store any clothing they brought that does not comply with the party promoter Klub Verboten’s dress code (leather, latex, and rubber are okay; cosplay, military outfits, suits, “fancy dress,” cotton, and jeans are not okay). I’d spent £100-ish on some small leather shorts and a collar that made it hard to move my neck, both sourced from a sex shop in London’s gayborhood earlier that day. The security guards on premises wave me into the after-party, but the friend who agreed to attend the event with me is nearly denied entry until he removes his shorts and pleads for forgiveness.

Inside the club space, we tap our credit cards in exchange for a fruity, canned cocktail concoction and survey the dance floor, where about 30 people are bopping up and down to a DJ’s soft techno music. A few make out with each other. At the center of the room, three steps up, organizers have placed a large bed and an upright frame with straps that are holding someone in the position of the Vitruvian Man. On the bed, one man is straddling a woman while rapidly pushing his fingers into her vagina, while another man is receiving a vigorous blowjob. My friend and I stand and watch, our entrancement broken by a guard who comes by to remind us: If you’re not participating, you have to leave.

And so we exit the small inner sanctum and head back to the dance floor. I dance a bit, and look around unsuccessfully for someone to at least make out with. But there on the dance floor, streaming on a television above our heads, is a live feed of the room with the bed and the straps and the blowjobs. And so mostly, I watched.

The Visitor would premiere in New York City a few weeks later. LaBruce tried to find a venue where he could stage a similar premiere-night sex party, but ended up in a Brooklyn space half the size of the London auditorium. The after-party was smaller too — held at the queer bar Singers, packed to the gills, with a makeshift room in the backyard made out of plastic curtains for anyone who might want privacy. It was a frigid night, though. I don’t think anyone had sex.

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Welcome to Margin of Error, a politics column from Tom Scocca, editor of the Indignity newsletter, examining the apocalyptic politics, coverage, and consequences of Campaign 2024.

Should Democrats attend Donald Trump's address to the joint session of Congress Tuesday night? The party can't decide what to do. Some Democratic senators and representatives want to boycott the event, to deny Trump's frenetic and lawless program of misrule any of the ceremonial trappings of the presidency. Others want to show up and participate as a rebuke to Trump—including the party's leaders in both chambers, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, who, Axios wrote, "want members to attend and bring special guests who have been negatively affected by the administration."

By Ahndrea Blue, Making A Difference Foundation

The current administration’s rollback of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives is more than a policy shift—it’s a direct threat to the progress BIPOC communities have fought for over generations. Across federal agencies and corporate boardrooms, programs designed to create equitable opportunities are being dismantled, sending a clear message that inclusion is no longer a priority. Without these initiatives, systemic barriers remain, career advancement becomes even more difficult, and wealth, education, and influence disparities continue to widen.

As these changes develop during Black History Month, a time meant to honor Black Americans’ resilience and contributions, the celebration feels overshadowed. DEI efforts are being quietly rolled back under the guise of economic constraints, legal concerns, or the misguided belief that they have already served their purpose. But the reality is that progress is treated as optional, and equity is deprioritized.

This dismantling reveals an uncomfortable truth that many DEI commitments were never truly embedded in corporate culture but existed only as long as they were convenient. For Black professionals, women, and other historically marginalized groups, the message is clear: their inclusion in leadership and decision-making was always conditional.

This regression ignores a fundamental fact—DEI is not about charity or compliance; it is essential to business success. Research consistently shows that companies with diverse leadership outperform their competitors, driving innovation, higher employee satisfaction, and stronger financial returns. Yet, instead of prioritizing long-term sustainability, many companies are choosing the easier path of retreat.

It’s ironic that as we commemorate the legacies of Black leaders who fought for equity and access, we witness opportunities being taken away. The common argument against DEI is that it fosters division, but in truth, it creates environments where employees feel valued, respected, and empowered. Rolling back these efforts only benefits those who have never faced systemic barriers, making workplaces less inclusive and equitable.

The impact is even more severe for Black women. Historically underpaid, overworked, or simply overlooked, they are disproportionately affected when DEI commitments fade. This retreating reinforces a cycle where their leadership potential is dismissed, career growth is stunted, and structural challenges remain unaddressed.

What’s most alarming is the precedent this sets. If companies can erase DEI programs without accountability, what’s next? Pay equity? Worker protections? Anti-discrimination policies? The erosion of DEI reflects a broader disregard for fairness and equal opportunity, extending beyond the workplace into society at large.

This moment demands action. DEI was never about quotas—it was about removing obstacles and ensuring talent, regardless of background, can thrive. True meritocracy only exists when everyone has access to the same opportunities.

Reflecting on Black History Month, we must move beyond acknowledgment and demand culpability. Companies that claim to value equity must prove it, not just when it is convenient but when it is difficult. Consumers, employees, and stakeholders must push for transparency and hold leadership to their commitments.

Progress is not a trend. Equity is not expendable. The fight for diversity, equity, and inclusion must continue—because Black history is still being written, and today’s choices will shape the stories of tomorrow.

Ahndrea Blue is the Founder and President/CEO of Making A Difference Foundation. Making A Difference Foundation’s mission is to make a difference in the lives of others, one person at a time, by helping them acquire the most basic human needs: food, housing, encouragement, and opportunity. To learn more about the organization and its hunger-related programs, please visit www.themadf.org or call 253-212-2778.