Four Video Game Adaptations
Imperial Messenger: Escape from The City Absolute
2027, WuYa Software
An adaptation of the Kafka parable A Message from The Emperor. After a brief cutscene in which the anonymous player character is seen leaning over the enormous deathbed of a stereotypical quasi-orientalist despot, gameplay begins sans tutorial or explanatory popup.
A third-person camera follows the player character (ambiguously gendered, clad in tunic & sandals) as they navigate a labyrinthine, procedurally-generated imperial city. 3D platformer mechanics allow the player to navigate the open-world map in three dimensions. A compass in the bottom-left corner of the screen ostensibly indicates the direction of the messenger's destination, but its orientation gradually shifts in random directions as one explores deeper into the city.
Though obviously frustrating, critics praised the richness of the game's procedurally-generated environments. As one explores, it is possible to encounter winding staircases, lofty arcades, precarious towers, soaring bridges, claustrophobic mazes, galleries, plazas, cathedrals, palaces, tenements, cisterns, minarets, alleys, promenades, parks, belfries, aqueducts, arenas, canals, and other unlikely architectural fantasies. Moreover, the city is peopled with taciturn but diverse NPCs: beggars, shopkeepers, peasants, bureaucrats, soldiers, courtesans, priests, madmen, refugees, slaves, bravos, pickpockets, noblemen, debutantes, astrologers, buskers, children, nurses, moneylenders, jugglers, crippled veterans, ascetics, and so on, all of whom are programmed to periodically obstruct the player's "progress" by coalescing into a mob, throng, crowd, assembly, procession, multitude, or parade.
Despite the developers' attempt at obscuring the source code, a community of curious and dedicated fans de-compiled the executable and determined that there is, in fact, no game entity representing the missive's recipient.
Pierre Menard, developer of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
Early access, Pierre Menard
This is the work of a semi-anonymous collective of artists and indie game developers who set out to adapt the famous short story by Borges. The development history of the game is difficult to track, but it seems that Morrowind was selected as video gaming's closest analogue to the Quixote thanks to its multivocal narrative, overall impact on the gaming scene, and ambiguous relationship to authorial intent (c.f. C0da).
Naturally, litigation by Bethesda Softworks has reduced the game to a kind of samizdat circulated on pirate sites. Though a few jokesters have packaged up Bethesda's Morrowind and distributed it as though it were Menard's, the true version of the game is still in development. At the time of writing, it consists of a fully-functional engine, a library of over 2,500 3D assets, the nine cells surrounding Seyda Neen, and 11 of the 36 Lessons of Vivec.
Spec Ops: Ace Attorney
2030, SulaCo Games
The eighth installment of the Spec Ops series and 19th entry in the Ace Attorney franchise was developed by an indie studio that somehow acquired both licenses during the industry upheavals of the 2029 fiscal year.
Having deemed that the success of Spec Ops: The Line was a result of having (loosely) adapted Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the developers decided that the sequel should tackle Lord Jim.
Gameplay is bifurcated into alternating chapters. During the Ace Attorney segments, players control Phoenix Wright as he defends special forces operator James Marlow from accusations of cowardice and desertion during an unnamed naval war (obviously based on 2028's "Operation Elite Pwnage" and subsequent conflicts in the Taiwan strait).
Interleaved between each phase of the trial, the Spec Ops chapters are first-person shooter missions in which the player controls James Marlow (post-desertion) as he battles neo-colonial mercenaries in the war-torn mountains of West Papua. In the final shooter mission, the player is faced with a choice: sacrifice Marlow to save a village of innocents, or flee. The outcome of this decision retroactively re-frames the events of the trial as either happening in reality or as the hallucination of a dying soldier.
Unfortunately, the game exhibited an over-reliance on heavy handed techniques for conveying its themes, most infamously a loading screen quote reading "He was one of us". Panned by most critics, SulaCo Games folded shortly after release.
Dread Hostel: Homecoming
2028, Go Back at Once! Ltd.
This game adapts Robert Aickman's short story The Hospice as a point-and-click adventure. Players inhabit Lucas Maybury, a thinly-characterized businessman who finds himself stranded next to a remote bed-and-breakfast after his Tesla runs out of charge. The player's aim is thus to escape the situation by finding a telephone and/or acquiring a charging cable.
The games aesthetic contours are self-consciously retro, meant to evoke classics like Myst and Riven as well as the gritty pseudoludography of Plastiboo and others. The interior of the hostel is murky and low-fi, its geriatric clientele stilted 2.5D grotesques. The game has no soundtrack.
Whereas the point-and-click genre is typically associated with fundamentally solvable puzzle games, Dread Hostel takes every opportunity to vex players. Critical events typically happen just outside the player's field of view, and some perplexing or disturbing images (e.g. that a guest's leg is manacled to the dinner table, visible from certain locations in the dining room) are simply not possible to interact with. Over the course of the game, a variety of notes and objects will fill the player's inventory, none of which are ever used to complete a challenge or solve a puzzle. The game ends with an anticlimax as events entirely outside the player's control make it possible to depart the hostel in peace.
Lauded (by the few who have played) it as a cult classic.