There’s that lovely expression for a certain kind of thinking: The good cliches have a sort of power of youth to them – they remain unbanished, unbanishable. The millionth time you hear it it’s as pleasing as the first time. Why? A sense of cooking, of laundry perhaps, of rocks spattering around inside the cool tube of a polisher on their way to becoming smooth. But also, the hands are invoked: thinking about something, focussing on it, turning it back and forth through the air, seeing how it feels with the fingers, noticing how it catches the light, testing the weight of the thing. Thinking with hands, with eyes.
I Am Dead previewDeveloper: Hollow Ponds/Richard HoggPublisher: Annapurna InteractiveAvailability: Out in September on Switch and PC
Anyway: I Am Dead, which is coming soonish to Switch and PC, announces itself as a game about being dead. You play someone who’s dead and who encounters a lot of other dead people on a quest to uncover the secret that threatens the island where they all used to live. There’s even a pet dog in it who’s also dead. Sparky, he’s called, which may or may not be a Peanuts reference. I certainly hope so.
But I Am Dead’s actually a game about turning things over, about looking at things from different angles. It’s about memory and perspective, and it’s also about the pieces that games are made of and, I think, perhaps the tools that make those pieces. And it’s about the pieces that people are made of. Dead people sometimes. And their dogs.
I Am Dead – Announcement Trailer – Nintendo Switch Watch on YouTube
It didn’t make much sense when I first saw it. I Am Dead is made by the people behind Hohokum and – more recently – Wilmot’s Warehouse. These are both enigmatic toy-like affairs that use striking design to lure the player into worlds where a lot of the interpretation is left up to them. I Am Dead first presented itself to me as an island, a beautiful island with a lighthouse and shops on the seafront. It looked gorgeous in its Mr Men, Clarice Cliff colours and friendly chunkiness, but it also… how to put it… had Hohokum suddenly gone 3D and open-world?