If you played Super Mario Bros. 3 or Super Mario World back in the day and thought to yourself, “Hey, this is great and all, but it would be better with queer fox girls in it,” boy have I got incredibly specific good news for you. Steam just got Kitsune Tails, a Mario-inspired platformer featuring fox girls who will be remembered as good friends by historians.

Kitsune Tails looks about as close to Super Mario Bros. 3 as you can feasibly get without risking a letter from Nintendo’s legal team. It’s a 2D platformer with elemental worlds, haunted houses, outfit-style power-ups, and minigames for collecting coins. There’s even an “optional true-to-life CRT filter for maximum nostalgia,” which I know one of my retro-savvy coworkers would appreciate.

This will come as a surprise: in Kitsune Tails by Kitsune Games, you play as a kitsune – a fuzzy-eared, bushy-tailed fox spirit messenger girl serving Inari, the Shinto god of rice, tea, fertility, and a few other things, I gather. Japanese mythology bleeds into plenty of levels and characters, too, from temple and outfit designs to various other yokai. Our heroine has a cute sorceress on one arm and a cute childhood friend on the other, and the creators – with this being a collaboration with co-publisher MidBoss LLC – aren’t shy about the love in the air. It’s all very sweet, and the pixel art is a dead-ringer for the SNES era. There seem to be robust design tools for making custom levels, too.

Here’s where the lore actually gets weird: this game is billed as a direct follow-up to Super Bernie World, a free Mario-like released in March 2020 that doubled as political advertisement for US senator Bernie Sanders, who was still in the US presidential race at the time. In it, you’d clear 11 states (and the District of Columbia) to “free the USA from the clutches of four Republicans in their castle lairs.” The team behind Super Bernie World, listed as Gamedevs for Bernie on Steam, regrouped to make Kitsune Tails, an original game that costs $20 (currently $18 with the launch discount), and now all I want to know is how Sanders would evaluate it. Somebody bring this game to the next senate hearing.

The devs seem to have polished their platforming skills judging from Kitsune Tails’ 99% positive Steam reviews, with 248 reviews at the time of writing. That, or – let’s be honest, and – people really like queer fox girls. Here’s my favorite user review, from olivvybee: “Everyone should get a free day off work to play the sword lesbian fox girl game.”