Someone at Nintendo Sneaked Pride Month into the Switch eShop

It’s Pride Month, which means gay flags are everywhere. This is also true of the Nintendo eShop, although you may have to look a little closer to find it. Scroll down for a moment in the Featured section and you’ll see that someone quietly snuck in a rainbow flag to bring attention to games with queer characters and themes on Nintendo Switch. It’s lovely to see, even if the spotlight is somewhat shadowed by various other billboards.

The Nintendo eShop has a section called Hidden Gems, a regular list of games that someone at Nintendo apparently thinks you should play but might have missed. Right now, though, the games on that list have a little more in common than just being cult favorites or titles that may have flown under the radar. You will find things like A normal lost phone, coffee talk, Go home, Life is Strange: True Colorsand speed dating for ghosts—all games related to weirdness in some way.

All 11 Hidden Gems Are Queer AF

As seen by YouTuber Chris “Campster” Franklin, this list of 11 queer Hidden Gems games doesn’t mention “Pride” in any capacity and is tucked away at the bottom of the Featured tab, which is the default tiled games window and sales lists you see when you open the eShop on Nintendo Switch.

“Is Nintendo trying to make a sale (of Pride) while explicitly avoiding mentioning (Pride) by name,” Franklin said. “Or am I just reading too much into this?”

While these hidden gems are, well, cleverly tucked away on the eShop, to put it mildly, it’s still great to see such cool queer games getting a little more spotlight this Pride Month. Carry night in the woods, an adventure game about a pansexual cat who commits crimes with a gay fox and hangs out with other queer anthropomorphic animals. (This one also happens to be a personal favorite.) Or the open-world detective game paradise killer, which features a group of queer and gender non-conforming people. Hell, even the cute adventure game. bugsnax normalizes different gender identities through the use of appropriate pronouns, thus treating gender fluidity as normal.

my city contacted Nintendo for comment.

Below is the full list of queer hidden gems:

• A normal lost phone
• bugsnax
• Chicory: a colorful tale
• coffee talk
• Go home
• Life is Strange: True Colors
• My time in Portia
• night in the woods
• paradise killer
• speed dating for ghosts
• Steven Universe: Save the Light