Tale of Tales' Sunset Takes Place During South American Military Coup

[roseofbattle]

Tale of Tales' Sunset Takes Place During South American Military Coup

[kickstarter=taleoftales/sunset-a-first-person-videogame-thriller]​

Tale of Tales' Sunset places the player in the middle of a war as a housekeeper.

Tale of Tales, developer of The Path, has successfully crowdfunded a housekeeping adventure game. Sunset places the player into the role of a young woman who works as a housekeeper in Anchuria, South America during a war. Your employer: a rich revolutionary. Tale of Tales won't be the first to tell a story about war through the viewpoint of someone who isn't a soldier, but it is joining the ranks of other developers hoping to shift the focus toward victims.

In Sunset, the player cleans the apartment of employer Gabriel Ortega. In the vein of other first-person exploration games like Gone Home, Sunset's story unravels through you poking around and finding information. Ortega has plenty of information on the revolution, and you learn about the war and revolution through the information you uncover in the apartment. You also affect the story and decide where you stand within it. Tale of Tales asks, "Who will you be when you can't be the man with the gun?"

The game takes place in the fictional setting of Anchuria, but in reality, South America was a place of competing political and economic ideals in the 1970s, even with the CIA backing a military coup in Chile in 1973. It will be interesting to see what Tale of Tales draws on to tell the story of Anchuria's military dictatorship.

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Austin Wintory, known for his work on flOw, Journey, and The Banner Saga, will be composing the music for Sunset.

Tale of Tales' kickstarter has already met its goal for Sunset and has 22 days to go. It estimates the game will be ready to release in March 2015 for PC, Mac, and Linux.

Source: Tale of Tales [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/taleoftales/sunset-a-first-person-videogame-thriller]


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[Scarim Coral]

Interesting concept. It kind of remind me of that game Viscera Cleanup except that you are more involved to the game.

 

[lacktheknack]

Seeing how they made the concepts of "Little Red Riding Hood x6" and "point-based colorful kaleidoscope sex simulator" work, I have faith they'd be able to pull off this one as well. Color me interested.

 

[Therumancer]

Interesting idea, but personally I play video games to get away from depressing reality and powerlessness so I'll doubtlessly be passing on it. That's one of my big problems with "arthouse" games, they tend to mostly be downers one way or another (and this certainly seems to be one), and to me that's become stereotypical, and worthy of mockery. I mean you can only do so much garbage about melancholy, powerlessness, lonliness, and irrelevancy before it all starts to run together and become almost a joke, where it seems every artist wants to run to the same place to try and be taken seriously.

Besides, while a lot of people will hate this point, if I was to ever do a game about "victims" during a war, I'd want to show multiple sides of it, and raise questions like "are we really dealing with victims"?

Now, some people will hate this but if I absolutely had to make a game like this (which please note is a generally bad idea, as I dislike the entire concept) rather than dealing with some fictional country decades ago, I'd set the game in say modern day Iran or Iraq. I'd probably call it "Before The Strike" start the game off with some typically left wing reporter QQing about collateral damage after a drone strike that took out a terrorist leader but also a dozen or so innocent civilians. I'd then zoom in in the cloudy footage, have it clarify, zip in to a dead guy on a stretcher, and then pseudo-rewind to a week or so before the events. The character the player would semi-control would be an Arab shopkeeper in your typical tribal village where a terrorist leader and some of his cronies are hiding out with the approval of the elders, but with the player otherwise not involved. The player will tend shop as villagers come in to talk gossip, while periodically heading out to gather for prayer when the sirens call. In being a good Muslim the player will be expected to properly discipline a daughter for showing too much skin, and the various prayer meetings will be based on a lot of the actual ones where you'll hear tons of garbage about the infidel, the great satan of America, and Muslim right to rule the world and the need to persist in the holy cause of uniting all before Allah. Perhaps even using real recordings. Of course your PC isn't an insurgent, so he simply goes away feeling giddy and his lifestyle reinforced, but is quite vocal about how he could never see himself picking up an AK or creating an IED. At some point your daughter is attacked and molested by someone from another village, and a trial is conducted by the elder who deems she must be stoned to death due to the guy not wanting to marry her, and due to the fact that she "obviously" provoked the attack by being a harlot, looking back at the previous handful of incidents where you had to discipline her (by the way, this really happens, and according to women's rights groups we only hear about a scant full of incidents). After some quiet mourning you and your wife head out and stone her to death, in an interactive, unflinching scene, where you join the rock throwers andcome to the forefront as would be expected, and the player is made to pick up, aim, and release rocks at a chained girl while she screams and begs for mercy from her daddy, in a very slow, grueling, death one small injury at a time. A few days then go by, some neighbors offer sympathy, many call you a bad father, and your own character who is a good Muslim sincerely believes he did the right thing, as he did warn her, and earlier beatings you administered simply did not take. Shortly afterwards a US plane flies over, drops a couple of bombs, your store goes down in the blast radius (the terrorist guy was next door) and you stagger out full of pieces of wood and shrapnel to be gathered onto a stretcher, the faces of some of your neighbors around you as things go blurry and then zoom back out to the news broadcast... The End. Some would probably call it profound, others racist, or whatever else because chances are it would be controversial. At the end of the day people would be given the question is to whether this dude who was just doing what he was raised to believe was actually a victim or not. Of course at the same time it would be such a downer I wouldn't want to play it... and I guess that would put it at the forefront of video game art.

The point here is more or less that if your GOING to make a game like this, at least have the guts to make it real and draw from things that are actually happening, whether it agrees with my opinions or not.