Beckett is a game about a man of the same name, an antihero who reluctantly agrees to track down a young man suffering from "The Soft Paranoia", a mental illness that warps reality. He quickly finds himself over his head, caught up in mysteries that threaten his life and his sanity. The story is told on an "abstract canvas" that reflects Beckett’s emotional impressions of the world around him. As such, things get weird fast, with characters appearing as anything from an antique brooch to a slice of meat. Everything in Beckett is open to interpretation, which the studio hopes will draw you in as a gamer. It takes its lead from theater and books, requiring the audience to be part of the experience.
Secret Experiment Studio founder Simon Meeks had this to say about his upcoming title: "I wanted the game to feel very visceral. With the advent of computer graphics – across film and games and everything – what the audience gets, time and time again, is the director's vision of how they interpret the text. If we're shown an alien, then that is the alien the director wants us to see. The imagination of the player doesn't need to do much."
The gameplay uses a point-and-click interface and everything is presented in top-down, digitally painted artwork, illustration, photography, film and print, with an audio pallet built through field recordings and original composition. There are only a handful of 3D models in the game, with most everything existing as real items built by the studio.
“Beckett is a visceral experience. It is an advent calendar of the absurd. It is a compelling journey through a disturbing unknown. We want people to feel different playing this game, and feel different afterwards,” Meek went on. “I love the idea of fiction and reality bleeding into one another. This isn't a game that relies on computer-generated graphics. It's a game that leans on the player's version of reality and the way they see the world.”
Beckett is the first in a new-wave of playable fiction by The Secret Experiment, aligning their titles more with literature and arthouse cinema, rather than popcorn blockbusters.
Beckett is available now on Steam, with a Mac version soon to follow.
Give the trailer a watch below.
