Grabbing the unlikely "sleeping giant" of gaming audiences
Roughly a year ago I found myself in a 'games as art' conversation - a conversation I know is tired, but one I hadn't heard of in earnest for a few years. But the person doing the talking wasn't wearing a beret or holding a painter's palette or anything like that. He was a very down to earth man called Simon Meek, making a game called Beckett, and what he said made a deep impression on me.
His game is weird and abstract, a surreal noir investigation closer to a museum piece than game - and which must have turned heads, for it's going on display at the V&A Museum in Dundee. It's a relatively swift story of an anti-hero on the heels of a young man suffering from something called The Soft Paranoia, a mental illness that warps reality and, therefore, the game. Characters can be brooches or slices of meat - everything is open to interpretation in Beckett. It's like a painting in that regard.
Technically, if you want a blunt description of it all, it's a point-and-click adventure presented in a top-down, relatively flat way, made up of photographs, artwork, illustration, photography, film and print, and a bespoke audio "palette" to go with it. Meek likened it to an independent European cinema piece compared to a Hollywood blockbuster.
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