As of yesterday, Apartment: A Separate Place just hit its goal of $20,000 on Kickstarter. Apartment: A Separate Place is an interactive fiction game by Game Director Robyn Tong Gray et al, similar to titles like Gone Home. It follows the story of Nick, a comic book artist whose girlfriend of four years recently broke up with him.
The player follows Nick through the apartment he shared with his girlfriend, recovering old memories they shared in an effort to make the space his own again.
As in many interactive fiction games, you don’t physically see how Nick, the point of view character, reacts to what he finds in their apartment. Meaning his reactions and mannerisms are left to the player’s own imagination based on in-game text.
The text in the game is meant to bring these characters to life and to depict their struggles in a human and relatable way. The main goal of the game is to put the player in the minds of the characters in order to tell this intimate story.
Even from the demo, it’s clear that this game is going to be an emotional journey. Though the current aesthetic is a bit dry, the apartment design still draws the player in. The waste basket filled to the brim with crumpled drawings, and the empty picture frames around the apartment really give the player a sense for the current state of sorrow that Nick is in.
By using Kickstarter to help with funding, the team aims to refine the aesthetics and make this game visually beautiful. The music in the demo is repetitive, though one of their stretch goals is to add a chamber orchestra to the soundtrack. Music can make or break a game. So this addition may ultimately help the player make a stronger emotional connection from moment to moment.
Apartment: A Separate Place aims to release in Spring 2016 and will be available to play on PC, Mac, and Linux. The demo is availabe to play on their Kickstarter.
If you try out the demo, please share your ideas in the comments!
