This allows you to see that there are water bottles, towels, and even a secret compartment of hidden cupcakes inside, displayed for you in profile as if you just cut a burrito in half lengthwise. Zoom in and the surface of the gym bag will fade as you pass through it. If you lock onto the object with a click, it comes center screen and you can rotate it. As a ghost, you can lock on to objects, sway about them, and zoom in through their solid being. So that takes us to the next part of locating objects. It keeps going until you lock onto a precious possession to the deceased, after which it will be findable in the environment. It’s fuzzy though, so you have to cycle forward like a kaleidoscope until the image becomes clear, and then the next memory segment will play and you’ll work to unfuzzy the next image. Poking them takes you into their psyche where a memory of the deceased plays out. When you discover someone with a relevant memory of your target ghost, they’ll have really obvious bubble-like animations flowing from them. So how does it work, this whole finding artifacts thing? Well, let’s start at memories.
The story takes some expected beats throughout (slight spoiler, the first ghost you find does not want to be a Custodian, putting an end to this journey in short order), but generally it’s a relaxing and unique way to tell an enjoyable narrative about Shelmerston, its inhabitants, and the cause of the volcano’s activity. Through both the memories, the objects themselves, and the convening with ghosts, I Am Dead has a lot of story to tell about each character and it does a very unique and engaging job of telling it. That means entering the memories of people precious to their living existence, learning about their treasured objects from memory slideshows, and then discovering said objects in the expansive environments they inhabited. To find these ghosts and convene with them, Sparky needs to smell possessions from their lives that were precious to them. This sets Lupton and Sparky on a quest around the island to convene with a number of ghosts who could be reasonable candidates for a Custodian replacement. If the people of Shelmerston are to survive, a new Custodian must be found and it can’t be someone who died recently, so unfortunately Lupton is off the list of possible candidates. That Custodian is weakening to a point where they can’t keep the volcano calm for much longer. Or rather, the volcano is supposed to be dormant, but it has started becoming active because it was kept in check by a Custodian who soothes the island.
See, Shelmerston is home to a dormant volcano. Lupton discovers the spirit of his likewise deceased pet and best friend Sparky, who tells him there is trouble brewing on the island. In I Am Dead, you play the role of Morris Lupton: A kindly old recently deceased fellow hanging around the tiny island of Shelmerston where he once lived. There’s some extra baggage here that I find unnecessary, but the narrative and gameplay loop of I Am Dead is definitely an extraordinary one. It’s an interesting experiment, not quite in bending blocks, turning keys, or meddling in contraptions, but rather in using ghostly influence to see the world the way you need to see it to find answers. Developed by Hollow Ponds and designer Richard Hogg (Wilmot’s Warehouse), I knew I was in for a puzzle and a narrative about ghosts, but I Am Dead has quite some quirk and charm past what I expected. I wasn’t quite sure what I was in for when I checked into Annapurna’s latest quirky adventure, I Am Dead.
0 kommentar(er)
