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LIVE-ACTION GAMES
L
ights, camera... gameplay? Erica is a
feature-length thriller following its
titular character as she becomes
embroiled in a conspiracy stretching
back to her father’s mysterious death
during her childhood. It features
talented actors and excellent cinematography. But
she never makes a decision without you having
some input. Erica’s creator, Flavourworks, is a
game developer, not a movie studio, tucked away
in a cosy games hub in London.
Following Jack Attridge, the studio’s co-founder
and creative director, around the labyrinthine
building full of props from the set, it’s impossible
not to keep an eye out for juicy development secrets.
Then we sit down to chat. “When we’re just walking
around the building now, we’re not thinking about
traversal. We’re not getting stuck on a corner of a
plant pot,” Attridge says. He’s right.
“We knew that doing film, we’d lose something,
which was that ability to walk around the
environment, to traverse,” he continues. “When we
start making a game it’s usually about exploring
3D space. Unity being a popular game engine that
people use, you can put the 3D cubes down, then
you’re like, ‘how do I move this around the
environment?’ And it means that all of your ideas
come from conflicts in traversal, or how your
relationship with that environment changes as
you’re moving something around.”MOVING PICTURES
While Attridge acknowledges the influence of
FMV games of old, he doesn’t like to think of Erica
within those confines. The main thing that interests
the studio is making games strictly based around
narratives, in the same vein as the likes of Until
Dawn or Detroit: Become Human. “We felt that
before we’d even said ‘We’re definitely going to do
live action,’ the thought
was, ‘If we weren’t doing
live action, would we
design this game the
same way as we are
now?’ As in, would we
not have traversal?”
says Attridge. “And the
answer was, ‘Yeah, we
would do it the same
way, because traversal is
not where the storytelling happens.’ [Something like]
actually navigating down and up some stairs for us
isn’t where the stories are.”
The format has to play to the strengths of the
game you want to design. “The thing that games
do really effectively, you can have a character jump
through a window and an explosion with lots of
smashed glass, and that’s pretty affordable in a game,
but that’s the thing that’s really expensive in a film,”
says Attridge. “And the thing that’s really expensive
in the game is trying to render something close to a
human face and an emotion. That’s the thing that’s
affordable in film.”
If you haven’t yet played Erica, it resembles a
movie, but it’s far from being one. Controlled with
swipes from your connected phone or on the
DualShock 4 touchpad, scenes seamlessly blendtogether as you make quickfire decisions or make
Erica interact with the world, for example by
unwrapping a package or wiping a mirror clean.
“We want to just make sure you never feel like
you are lacking control. The other rule we had along
with the [ability to always remain] silent was you
have to interact every 15 to 20 seconds,” says
Attridge. “If I ever get tricked into leaning back and
putting this down and I have a sip of this, and then
a choice comes up? Game over.” As a player you
barely notice how detailed the decisions are, or even
that you can remain stoic throughout (aside from in
the game’s mirror-based introduction). But that
speaks to how well Flavourworks pulled things off.
“It was very important to us that the story was told
through the player being involved and not taking
turns with the storytellers.”HEADING TO THE NEXT STAGE
Attridge has a background in film, but it wasn’t
cinema that gave him the inspiration to do a
live-action game. “One of the seeds that made me
really inspired to start FlavourWorks was going to
an immersive theatre show by PunchDrunk called
The Drowned Man,” he says. Unlike traditional
theatre, where you sit in a seat and watch the stage,
immersive theatre has the audience wandering a
space where things are happening all around them.
“[They got] 200,000 square feet of building over
four floors, and completely built every inch of that
building to be a world,” he says, “You’re enveloped in
this ambient moody sound, and music, smell, and
you feel temperature, and you can taste and touch
anything. And you can flick through any prop or
object in this world. It’s all detail you can play with,
right? There’s like no limits. And so I saw that and
thought ‘why am I even making videogames?’”
Attridge wanted to take that energy and translate
it into gaming. “There was no wrong way to do [the
play], right? Like you
went in with your
curiosity and that was
it. It wasn’t about game
overs, it wasn’t about
skill,” says Attridge.
“With Erica the idea
was ‘If I walk into a
room early, do I see a
hero or whereas if I
walked into there late I
saw a villain, based on what I saw?’ And so that’s the
idea of Erica, that everything comes to the end, and
based on what you’ve seen, it’ll colour your
expectations of what you think is going on.”SEARCH PARTY
Watching an interactive movie might be simple
enough, but another take on the live-action game
gets you Googling. Telling Lies is Sam Barlow’s
second game in the genre (Her Story came to PC
in 2015), and has just launched on PS4, though his
journey before going indie included the likes of
Silent Hill and Legacy Of Kain. Unlike Erica, which
has a similar runtime to your average film, Telling
Lies gives you a database with hours of recorded
videos (from spy cameras to single halves of video
calls) and asks you to try to piece together what“WE WANT TO MAKE
SURE YOU NEVER
FEEL LIKE YOU ARE
LACKING CONTROL.”