Title: Nostalgia Nest
Author(s): The Salamander King
Publisher: Hollow Press
Year: 2026
I enjoy the concept of someone doing the worldbuilding for a video game that doesn’t exist, and in fact, I’ve got a whole book about exactly that concept, by Super Eyepatch Wolf, The Bizarre World of Fake Video Games. Maybe I’ll post about that in the future, or maybe this post is all I have to say about lore books. Who knows.
Nostalgia Nest is a largely pictorial affair - while there is some text on most pages, the bulk of the content is evocative imagery conjuring up the false memory of a 90s home computer RPG, floppy discs and all. There’s a gauzy, dot-matrix filter over everything, an effect made tangible by the lush frosted-transparent dust jacket in which the book comes wrapped. The imagery within evokes some lost version of Silent Hill that existed for the ZX Spectrum. The book’s preface indicates that the “game” was distributed under the title Nostalgia Simulator, but that upon booting up the first disc, the title shown on screen would invariably be “Nostalgia Nest”. A nest does feel appropriate as a vessel for nostalgia, and nostalgia itself is right there in every atom of this “fake video game lore book” thing.
This book was released by Hollow Press, who seem to be one primary proponents of the “fake game lore book” concept. They published Eyepatch Wolf’s above-mentioned book, along with the wonderful Vermis series, which is what got me started on this kick. I found the first volume of Vermis on the shelf at my local comic shop, Lucky’s in Mt. Pleasant, Vancouver. It looked compelling, so I grabbed it and now my library has a small section dedicated to lore books, mostly for fake games but there are a couple in there that have actual game counterparts.