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What does it mean to recreate your old home in a video game?Myhouse.dev
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Image credit:Fuzzy Ghost
Image credit:Fuzzy Ghost
Sometimes a home only becomes a home when you leave. I recently moved out from a London flat I’d rented for over a decade, for instance, and this has properly done a number on me. Being given my notice transformed the place from a transient pile of cadaverous lino and spasmodic plumbing into something mythical and unnerving – a whole chapter of my life completed and reduced to a piece of masonry in the rearview mirror, a relic I had been living in for years without quite realising.
JDM - Was It My Hat, Andrew? Third-person gameplay trailerWatch on YouTube
JDM - Was It My Hat, Andrew? Third-person gameplay trailer
One thing that fascinates me about the idea of recreating your home in something as fiddly as a video game is how the process might inadvertently become critique, as the practicalities of adaptation reveal qualities not quite apparent to the dweller. JDM uses fixed camera perspectives, for instance, jammed into the corners of rooms and hallways, and framing things this way has made Foley think twice about the confines of the old house.
“I realised just how wide and long the areas are in the first twoResident Evilgames,” he says. “The narrowness of a Sydney terrace has been nightmarish for a set-camera. There’s so many angles needed to show every nook and cranny, and doors in annoying places. It’s been a lot of work trying to choose the right angles to not frustrate players.” Art director Scott Ford has been more “more impressionistic in recreating the texture of the house,” Foley says. “It’s more the feel of it, rather than getting it true to life.”
Image credit:Fuzzy Ghost
JDM might parody the location that inspired it, but it does so… well, I’m not sure “lovingly” is the word, but there’s a certain affection. After all, Ford and Foley lived out many years of their lives in that terrace house, and much has changed. “We often lament that there’s very little film and no games, as far as I’m aware, that capture the Brisbane city that we grew up in, in the early 2000s,” Foley goes on. “And while Janet is set in a fictitious version of Sydney we always hope to try and capture something that records the moment in time, even if it’s just the view of the brutalistUTS Towerout the window being alone - there’s now many taller buildings around it.”
In StudioBando’sSopa - Tale Of The Stolen Potato(Steam pagehere), a magic realist adventure set in South America, home is more a thing to reimagine than recall, because home is where you tell stories. The game casts you as the bright-eyed Miho, who is helping his grandmother fix dinner. Sent into the larder to fetch a fateful tuber, Miho has a confrontation with a giant, thieving frog and is dragged through a portal to the shore of a fabulous river.
SOPA - Tale of the Stolen Potato - TrailerWatch on YouTube
SOPA - Tale of the Stolen Potato - Trailer
“It’s almost the exact layout of my grandmother’s house, back in this small rural town, lost in the middle of Colombia,” he says. “Everything is is filtered through Miho’s take on it, but everything does have a reference to some degree, large or small.
“So for example, the river is based on hearing these stories from my family growing up, of a river that ran through the back of their house, and all the stories that they have there. And that would have transformed the house into this magical place. Even the black market in the game is… there’s a lot of places that have that sort of stilt-like architecture, but of course, we’ve pushed it to another degree, to make it feel more magical.”
This isn’t just autobiography, Castañeda qualifies. Sopa makes itself at home in a tradition of oral narrative as much as a specific time and place. “It’s a lot more about taking family stories that you’d hear that would sort of become tall tales, as they were passed down from generation to generation, and sort of what you perceive that story to be, when you would hear it as a kid, and being in that space.”
Image credit:StudioBando
Now that I’ve written both games up, Miho’s relationship with his grandmother feels like the benign version of the friction between tenant and rentier on show in Janet DeMornay Is A Slumlord (And A Witch). Both matriarchs haunt the location in different ways. Where JDM’s otherworldly elements are invasions, Sopa’s fantastical interludes are a kind of mischievous rebellion. They’re childish projections born of being told to be a good boy, do your chores and stop messing with the furniture.
Miho’s Nana acts as a curb on his delusions, while also being the source of them. It reminds me of how my own dad would try to discourage my infantile habit of seeing flying snakes and crocodiles in the walls, while also telling me bedtime stories about a mad carrot who lived in our fridge.
