Krish Raghav

So @playtopia.bsky.social fulfilled my long-held dream of becoming the answer to a pub quiz question, with Don't Get Your Hopes Up featured in one of the rounds. I was even wearing the game t-shirt at the time!

Under the Flags, the Sun (2025) This fully archival journey through the 35 years of Alfredo Stroessner’s regime in Paraguay reveals unseen footage and explores one of the longest-running dictatorships in history, whose effects still...

5. Under the Flags, the Sun
A chilling archival reconstruction of the 35-year Stroessner dictatorship in Paraguay that plays like found footage horror, every image haunted by what it doesn't show, the depravity and evil visible only as negative space. boxd.it/RZVC

Letters from Wolf Street (2025) A street in downtown Warsaw transforms into a kaleidoscopic portrait of Polish society. Behind the viewfinder is an Indian immigrant, who seeks to overcome the boundaries between himself and an anxiet...

4. Letters from Wolf Street
My fav film this year. Inconsolability and desolation as a city's mark on you. To let a place transform you, to allow for the ruin of your old self, and to wonder: "what has this taken from me?" This hit very close, and I'm so grateful to have watched it: boxd.it/SuTM

Holy Destructors (2025) It observes an astonishing cosmos of blooming microorganisms, such as fungi and mould, which have been documented with patience and precision. These images are connected to museum paintings depicting ...

3. Holy Destructors
Leave fungi out of your weird personal religious hangovers!! The two halves of this ("fungi" and "catholicism") never cohered for me, and what was gorgeous imagery in one became annoying contrivances in the other. Would love to read the original grant proposal: boxd.it/Yiic

YouTube video by emaroun85 Bendaly Family-Do you love me

The title track is such a bop (the film actually started as a visual archaeology of the enigmatic "Bendaly Family" band that released this song in the 70s) www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YOX...

Do You Love Me (2025) A playful and personal journey through Lebanon’s audiovisual memory, composed entirely of archival footage. It is a love letter to Beirut, spanning 70 years of film, TV, home videos, and photography, ...

2. Do You Love Me?
Heartbreaking and irresistible in equal measure, Do You Love Me's evocation of Beirut through film, music videos, home movies and news broadcasts starts as a meditation on war and music and pieces together, from fragments, a whole visual history of a shattered city. boxd.it/Wwu8

A man on a red buggy watches a DC-3 plane coming in to land on a forest clearing acting as improvised runway. The setting: the Colombian Amazon

1. Grounded (En Tierra)
stunning film on the DC-3, a ruggedly reliable pre-WW2 plane still in use in the Colombian Amazon to connect remote communities. We see the culture of repair and acts of care that keep the DC3s running / these communities functioning, but also rage at abandonment boxd.it/Yrms

Continuing this thread for films and interactive works seen at IDFA 2025:

Genuinely in disbelief that Don't Get Your Hopes Up is an official 2025 @indiegameawards.gg nominee!! I'm honoured to be alongside my personal game of the year @wednesdays-game.bsky.social in the category "Emotional Impact" ❤️

I think a lot about Nathan Altice's 2013 piece on videogames and fashion, thinking about "whether we might like to wear a game, or dance with it, or rest in it." metopal.com/2013/09/30/p...

If your circumstances allow, I highly recommend thinking of your game as more than just a product on a storefront. "Don't Get Your Hopes Up" was always intended as a gift, a zine, an op-ed, like something crocheted with friends. The conversations and friendships it has sparked have changed my life ❤️

Gosh I loved this so much. I'm usually a notorious skimmer but I really savoured the richness of detail here. One of my favourite books this year ❤️

If you want a short, spooky activity for the evening this (free!) surreal horror game about housing insecurity is funny, atmospheric, and probably too real for anyone who's looked for somewhere to live in a city in 2025

My next game - also called Don't Get Your Hopes Up - should be about the South African visa process.

A beautiful, colourful laurel says "Official Selection, Playtopia 2025" for the game Don't Get Your Hopes Up

Got my hopes up and am excited to reveal that I will be in Cape Town for @playtopia.bsky.social!! I am so excited to meet everyone and do everything. Say hi if you'll be around, and send me all your best Cape Town / Western Cape recs!

They announced it on Instagram! I'll be there with the game if SA approves my visa 🥲

Thank you so much, Doug! ❤️ Looking forward to hearing you speak at @playtopia.bsky.social!!

I really enjoyed this! Super funny, biting (magical realist?) exploration of housing crisis in Amsterdam (but sadly very relatable beyond just the Netherlands). Recommended.
bsky.app/profile/kris...

This image shows the games main logo. Consisting of building at different angles with a pair of eyes under the games title. The following quote from our review is also included: “it is a deeply engaging, vital, eye-opening piece of work, chock-full of empathy and critical thinking."

You're looking for a new apartment in Amsterdam. Your once-confident search is morphing into panic. Nothing is available. Anything will do. ANYTHING.

Learn more on Don’t get your Hopes Up in our full review of this free game:

somanygames.co.uk/review/dont-...

A screenshot from Anthology of the Killer episode 5. Two horror nurses are reading a zine and commenting that it is. "Truly heinous document" on account of mentions of "Cannibal Blood Feast" and "More Knife Murders". The protagonist BB replies, distraught: "Those are BANDS!!! It's called a scene report!!"

Replaying Anthology of the Killer to prepare for a zine fair this weekend

Amsterdamse woningnood inspireert comic book artist tot game Krish Raghav ondervond hoe moeilijk het is om een huis te vinden. Het inspireerde hem tot het maken van Don't Get Your Hopes Up. Zijn eerste game ooit.

Krish Raghav ondervond hoe moeilijk het is om een huis te vinden. Het inspireerde hem tot het maken van Don't Get Your Hopes Up. Zijn eerste game ooit.

#gamedev #indiedev #dutchgames

VICTIM OF A NEW AGE, by Simon Frank 9 track album

For Bandcamp Friday, highly recommend checking out Simon's new album (which partly soundtracks Don't Get Your Hopes Up!). Out now on digital and cassette via Nocturnal Technology: nocturnaltechnology.bandcamp.com/album/victim...

That's fair! Making this game was my way of processing that trauma tbh 😭

A screenshot from the game Don't Get Your Hopes Up shows the protagonists texting each other about a cursed apartment

Review on Steam for the game Don't Get Your Hopes Up, which reads: "Simultaneously Kafkaesque yet dismally grounded depiction of the horrors of the housing market, which very succinctly puts into words the same despair I've personally been overwhelmed by when increasingly lowering my standards browsing available rentals on Willow."

Review on Steam for Don't Get Your Hopes Up, whivh reads: "Very atmospheric, short experience. The endless basements house is my favorite. Rentable apartments have a liminal space vibe anyways, so why not go with the extreme version of it?"

A poster for the game Don't Get Your Hopes Up, showcasing its selection for the Game Devs of Color 2025 expo.

Please consider "Don't Get Your Hopes Up" for your spooky season coverage! A free 40 min game about the horrors of the Amsterdam housing market, with elements of cosmic and psychological horror. A disquieting, demented experience that is all-too-real.

Steam: store.steampowered.com/app/3795490/...

11. Don't Get Your Hopes Up

Lovely little game of househunting in Amsterdam turned into a demented fever dream. A lot of delightful local touches if you know the city but should be relatable to anyone who's interacted with a major city property market in the last decade. Completely free on Steam!

A screenshot showing sources of traffic to the game Don't Get Your Hopes Up on itch.io. the sources indicate incoming hits from Microsoft Teams and Slack apps.

I love that a significant source of traffic to Don't Get Your Hopes Up is, presumably, people dropping the link in their workplace group chats.

Thank you so much, Jingtong! 😭

Finally finished Don't Get Your Hopes Up (store.steampowered.com/app/3795490) by @krishraghav.bsky.social all I have to say is pls play it yourself! Without spoiling the experience too much here are my favourite moments in the game with minimal context

1. This was a brutal read, I audibly gasped

Aaaah thank you so much for playing! I love Lil' Guardsman so much, and this means a lot to me ❤️

Don't Get Your Hopes Up is all architectural horror, human warmth, and unnervingly stoic pigeons Don't Get Your Hopes Up is a short interactive comic about Amsterdam's housing shortage and architectural horror.

I really, really loved this bite-sized narrative 'horror' game last night. Do yourself a favour and check out Don't Get Your Hopes Up. www.rockpapershotgun.com/dont-get-you...