New indie game A Gay’s Life aims to shine a spotlight on what it’s like to be LGBTQ in China. While China decriminalized being gay in 1997, negative stereotypes and discrimination against the LGBTQ community still prevails.

Earlier this year we reported that The Sims 4 had been banned in China, believed to be a result of the game’s same-sex romances.

A Gay’s Life is an Honest Look at Being Gay in China

Released back in May, indie web game A Gay’s Life provides a look at the hardships faced by LGBTQ people in China. The game follows a young gay man as he comes out and begins to enter the dating scene.

During the course of the game, players will be able to rack up “self-acceptance” points. The decisions that players make will also influence which ending that they get with A Gay’s Life currently offering nine different outcomes for its emotional narrative. You could fall in love and live happily ever after with a gay doctor, or you could end up in a sham marriage to a straight woman, just to name a couple of the endings.

"A Gay's Life" is a web game that looks inspired by #FlorenceGame but is GAY and CHINESE which is frickin' awesome! Can someone with better Chinese skills than me check it out and let me know what it's like? 🇨🇳🏳️‍🌈 https://t.co/W2kF3MBA3l pic.twitter.com/7C1JkI28b9 — ken wong (@kenwongart) October 28, 2018

Huang Gaole, the Beijing-based developer behind the game (Gaole identifies as gay) told the South China Morning Post that ““I hope through an easy-to-read, immersive, emotional, and interesting interactive story, I’ve created concrete figures to show some of the awkward situations that gay people around me still face in today’s society.” Gaole and the development team also plans to improve A Gay’s Life‘s narrative, including introducing additional endings to the story.

A Gay’s Life has already proved to be a hit in China, where it has been downloaded more than one million times from the region’s Chengguang gaming platform. An English-language version is also being planned for the end of 2019.

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