Graveyard game: walk around until you die
Here's a video-game that sounds like hours of bittersweet fun:
Link (Thanks, Kris!)
The Graveyard is a very short computer game designed by Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn. You play an old lady who visits a graveyard. You walk around, sit on a bench and listen to a song. It's more like an explorable painting than an actual game...Buying the full version of The Graveyard adds only one feature, the possibility of death. The full version of the game is exactly the same as the trial, except, every time you play she may die.
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Yeah that game doesn't seem like it would get too many repeat players. The possibility of death does add a little suspense...I think?
I'm not sure who'd play it once and then go as far as to download a different version but I guess it may interest some.
Absolutely stupendous.
I think it looks banal, tacky, shallow and designed for profit, most likely aimed at the young and inexperienced. I can't even muster the energy to really feel insulted by it. It's too stupid.
It'll likely be a hit with the emo and goth kids.
I wish things were like they were in ancient Egypt where some people spent their entire lives thinking about and planning for the afterlife. I mean, if you believe in an afterlife, it certainly makes since to prepare for it. Trillions of year, yet most do so little, and think about it hardly at all.
Personally, I have no idea why there isn't more advertising in the graveyards. It seems to me that a grave marker is the perfect place to put up an advertisement given the permanency of granite.
Given that most people's entrepreneurial ideas these days don't extend very far beyond some kind of advertising scheme, I personally have floated the idea of selling advertising rights to my gravestone into infinity so long as it was enough income to support me in the manner to which I've become accustomed in the here and now.
In fact, corporations could sponsor our afterlives in a manner. I, for one, have long thought that the cemetery has been long overdue for a tech upgrade. When people visit my grave, I want a holographic avatar of myself to rise out it to welcome them, give them a tour, and tell them a "ghost" story or two.
If all dead people had a holographic avatar, every night, at the stroke of midnight, everyone would get out of their grave for some kind of magnificent totentanz. Everyone happy and dancing together at last.
Even the overly sentimental and banal has its' place if well executed, and I thought that the soundtrack part was rather dignified in a carnival el muerto kind of way.
More than just this specific piece, I'd love to see more short interactive fiction in general.
Reminds me very much of Passage:
http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/
I enjoyed Passage a lot.
@# Remmelt
If you enjoyed Passage, you should check out the game Jason Rohrer made after Passage, Gravitation:
http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/gravitation/
Gravitation moves from the idea of simply watching this sort of thing unfold (the story of a life told in a matter of seconds, the end of the life of an old woman) to actually implicating the person playing the game in the outcome of the "life" that is being presented. Gravitation is, in this sense, somewhat more abstract, but it's pretty successful in realizing its goals.
The idea of involving the player in the outcome of the scenario, even in the limited scope of a game like Gravitation, is one of the things that separates video games from other ...well, I'd say "forms of art," but we could just say that this is one of the qualities that can make games, and video games especially, unique experiences for the audience (or reader, or player, whatever).
Games like the Graveyard (and other work done by or presented by Tale of Tales) seem very much like the sort of vivisection of ideas we see in fine art all the time -- highly concentrated snippets of art that can have implications deep, wide and/or far, but which are often, in and of themselves, utterly banal.
Hours of entertainment, not really, but it is something I'd drag out to show visitors to amuse them for ten minutes. Everyone's seen Kiwi! so it's about time I had something new and depressing.
Is it just me or does the little old woman look and walk like Yoda?? Rounded wrinkled face, kind of hopping along with a cane. Think if you colored her green and streched out her ears it would look just like Yoda.
So sad and a good way to spend time after being left for dead by an anti Emo crowd.
If you hold down the "t" key during the start screen you get unlimited ammo, which makes beating the crypt level a lot easier.
I hope it uses "Just Like Heaven" as you play the dead-lady-walking ...
Pyros: Graveyard advertising (amongst other tacky angles) was once attempted by video game developer Acclaim.
How do you get past the Lich?
It immediately reminded me of 8, which turns out to be by the same people. I'm not sure if these games are for me, but I like the art direction.
When I played the game, I tried going around the thing behind the chair. I failed, but when I came back, it seemed that my index finger was attached to something back there. I walked away, and my finger simply stretched. I managed to make it all the way back to the gate with my several-metre-long index finger trailing behind me.