But it's not quite like a typical hidden object game. I was not taking scrupulous notes but the memory leads to the notion that we have to go and find a medal. This is memory: there's something there, a flash of colour, go deeper! Go deeper! Turn it over a little in your mind. There's a wonderfully mechanical aspect to all of this - not cogs and gears, but lenses, splitting the colours, orbing the light until it spins through various wine-bottle ripples and finally resolves. You get a disk of blurred colour, and you use the triggers, left and right, to warp and shimmy the colours until images come into focus. We have to first interrogate the memory and then search in the real world for the object that the memory focused on. So in the lighthouse we dive inside someone's head as they are doing yoga practice. You do this, beautifully, by exploring the living people who knew them. Playing as a recently deceased man and his dog, your job is to connect with various ghosts on the island. What follows, as the developers suggested to me, is a sort of hidden object adventure.Īnd the objects are hidden in part in people's memories. The lighthouse has been repurposed as a yoga spa and - I wasn't taking scrupulous notes - it's now run by robots. So you can turn each floor of the lighthouse on its central spindle, and drop down floors to see what's going on elsewhere. The whole world and everything in it! Remember that bit. Or rather it's both, a location built by developers who see the whole world and everything in it as a toy. We start inside the lighthouse, and the lighthouse is more toy than location. had Hohokum suddenly gone 3D and open-world?Ī recent demo over Discord put any worries aside. It looked gorgeous in its Mr Men, Clarice Cliff colours and friendly chunkiness, but it also. I Am Dead first presented itself to me as an island, a beautiful island with a lighthouse and shops on the seafront. These are both enigmatic toy-like affairs that use striking design to lure the player into worlds where a lot of the interpretation is left up to them. I Am Dead is made by the people behind Hohokum and - more recently - Wilmot's Warehouse. It didn't make much sense when I first saw it. And it's about the pieces that people are made of. It's about memory and perspective, and it's also about the pieces that games are made of and, I think, perhaps the tools that make those pieces. I certainly hope so.īut I Am Dead's actually a game about turning things over, about looking at things from different angles. Sparky, he's called, which may or may not be a Peanuts reference. There's even a pet dog in it who's also dead. You play someone who's dead and who encounters a lot of other dead people on a quest to uncover the secret that threatens the island where they all used to live. Availability: Out in September on Switch and PCĪnyway: I Am Dead, which is coming soonish to Switch and PC, announces itself as a game about being dead.But also, the hands are invoked: thinking about something, focussing on it, turning it back and forth through the air, seeing how it feels with the fingers, noticing how it catches the light, testing the weight of the thing. Why? A sense of cooking, of laundry perhaps, of rocks spattering around inside the cool tube of a polisher on their way to becoming smooth. The millionth time you hear it it's as pleasing as the first time. The good cliches have a sort of power of youth to them - they remain unbanished, unbanishable. While I Am Dead ultimately explores the afterlife, including memories of those who have passed, I could not help but place greater interest in the overall setting and its residents, both dead or alive.There's that lovely expression for a certain kind of thinking: I'm just turning it over in my head. Whether it was the traditions of the island, the history of its residents, or simply the beautiful locations, Shelmerston was easily the highlight of my experience. While it’s short and the gameplay loop does get repetitive, the overall narrative, aesthetics, and audio turn Shelmerston into a beautiful location. Overall, I Am Dead is still the solid title it was when it was first released on the PC and Nintendo Switch. Overall, both of these elements lend themselves to crafting an amazingly unique setting and population of Shelmerston. Lastly, the game has a soothing soundtrack and a delightful voice acting cast. Despite this, it does not detract much from the gameplay, and overall make the game nicer to look at and play. While this style is quite visually pleasing, it does make some items hard to find in that part of the gameplay loop. I Am Dead features a vibrant, soft, and interesting aesthetic that lends itself to the quirky yet mysterious narrative.
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