Firewatch henry voice11/10/2023 They do, of course, belong to a loose genre known as experiential games, most commonly associated with two titles – The Chinese Room’s Dear Esther and Fullbright’s Gone Home – which stripped back all interactive components, and put the focus on simply experiencing the environment and narrative. What both Firewatch and Cibele have in common is the idea of experience being the central component rather than action or puzzle-solving. That’s where the folders full of my pictures, blog posts and poems came from – it was to give the player context so that they can feel like they understand the character outside of what she’s just saying.” So I added real things from my life so that people could understand who I was from many different angles – they could infer what I was like without really being with me. “As I was writing the script, I realised there were things I want to express that I couldn’t through dialogue alone I decided it had to be more than just playing in this online game and listening to conversations. “I kind of realised I had to establish a critical distance from what was happening,” explains Freeman. Nina Freeman is both the designer and ‘star’ of Cibela, a game that analyses her online relationship with a gamer named Blake And they often contradict the story she’s telling Blake. To this end, the player gets access to in-game Nina’s PC desktop, which contains poems, journal entries and photos – these are all genuine relics from Freeman’s life. But at the same time, Freeman wanted us to understand the friction between the way the in-game Nina presents herself to Blake and what she’s actually thinking. The player effectively takes on the role of Nina as she meets her boyfriend online, and we listen in on her conversations with him, in a familiar adventure game style. I added real things from my life so that people could understand who I was from many different angles Nina FreemanĪnother intriguing example released this year is Cibele, a semi-autobiographical game about designer Nina Freeman’s relationship with a man (known as Blake) she meets in an online role-playing adventure. And it’s an approach that’s becoming more common. In a medium where the default mode is for us to identify with the character, it’s a refreshing change to be told that the person we’re ostensibly controlling may not be entirely trustworthy. The first-person shooter Bioshock used it to devastating effect in its tale of a failed underwater utopia, experienced via the duplicitous voice of Frank Fontaine while the psychological horror game Heavy Rain famously pulled a character plot twist so audacious, some players could barely forgive the writers for their transgression.įirewatch is certainly more subtle than those examples, but it cleverly explores the conflicted emotions of its lead character, while allowing the player to maintain a skeptical distance. Games have, of course, played with the literary device of the unreliable narrator for many years. (Spoiler alert: next paragraph contains Bioshock and Heavy Rain spoilers)
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