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Anchorhead, environmental storytelling, Game Design, games, gaming, IFDB Spelunking, interactive fiction, Moondrop Isle, Myst, mystery, photography, puzzle design, puzzles, Return of the Obra Dinn, sub rosa, text adventures, urban exploration, urbex
The newly released Moondrop Isle is many things: a mystery, a puzzle-fest, an experiment in multi-author interactive fiction… but it’s also about urban exploration. It’s about going to a place where people once lived and worked, since left to nature and the elements. This is something of which I have first-hand experience…
Exploring abandoned places is a natural fit for an adventure game. Poking around somewhere you’re not meant to be and piecing together clues from the past is perfect for a mystery game that can easily accommodate puzzles.
There are at least three elements to urban exploration (as opposed to, say, fantasy cave exploration) that make it a rich vein for games, especially narrative games with puzzles: Abandonment, Breaking & Entering, and Verticality.
Abandonment
In an abandoned place, the interloper catches a glimpse of the past, and when they do, they may be seeing one of three pasts, each layered on the other: the original function of the place, the frozen moment of abandonment, and the afterlife of abandonment. The layering of the pasts allows a story to be told of a place as it once was, and as it came to be.
Original function
An abandoned place can be frozen in good condition, and offer up something like an experience of what it would have been like to go through that place when it was in use, only with less people and no one stopping you poking around the back rooms. This is what it’s like to explore non-abandoned urban locations in real life (i.e. trespassing).
This is the fundamental design of Myst (1993): the strange machines are still mostly in good working order, the locations are mostly kept quite tidy. Its just everyone had gone. The real allure of Myst (at least for me) is not just tinkering with old mechanisms, but exploring the Ages to learn about the character of two men, finding out who they are by what evidence they have left behind. Discovering a working projector which transforms a rose into a human skull is an early dark hint at to the nature of one of the men that made that place his home.
The Frozen Moment
When you explore an abandoned place, especially if no one else has disturbed it since, you might see evidence of the final moments that marked the place’s abandonment. This layer of history is the key part of detective investigation. Return of the Obra Dinn (2018) presents a ship seemingly abandoned, the remaining evidence in the form of corpses and signs of destruction). Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (2015) lets you explore a whole village just after everyone disappeared.
Artistically deployed skeletons are a common trope in RPGs. In the Fallout series, they’re ubiquitous despite the apocalypse having taken place many decades before the events of each game. It’s common in such games to come upon a corpse in the state it was in when it died, perhaps with a diary in its inventory or the cause of death obvious from the scene dressing. Environmental storytelling of frozen moments can be more subtle, but you would be forgiven for thinking it always had to include a dead body.
Afterlife of Abandonment
Life goes on. Abandoned places don’t usually stay pristine like in Myst. Wildlife overgrows, brickwork crumbles, new people move in and start repurposing the old stuff. In Moondrop Isle swimming pools have become skate bowls, bamboo has clogged up courtyards, birds nest in a monorail station, and graffiti from previous urban explorers can be found scrawled on the walls. The more post-abandonment a place becomes, if life continues there then the less the original function of the place remains, until perhaps only a few ruins remain.
Breaking & Entering
A mystery requires secrets, and a game of exploration usually requires those secrets be physically manifested (as old letters, film reels, secret journals, keys). For a physical secret to remain secret, it must necessarily be hidden and guarded (if only by locks and walls). Breaking and entering is the means to get to such secrets. Puzzles around gaining entrance are straightforward to embed in the story and setting. This is the core dynamic in many adventure games: breaking into a place where you shouldn’t be. It’s most of the gameplay in Sub Rosa (2015), where you break and enter the house of your rival. It’s the first sequence in Anchorhead (1998), breaking and entering into the Estate Agent’s office.
The transgressive act is the mark of the adventurer. If you’re where you should be, doing what is expected of you then you are not adventuring, no matter what ‘adventure playgrounds’ or climbing or kayak adventure package holidays would have you believe. In Broken Sword II (1997), you mostly play as George, but when you briefly play as his more normal friend, Nico, she will tell you “that’s something George would do” when you suggest stealing something from a museum.
Being blocked off from somewhere is itself a puzzle. It’s the most natural and common puzzle type for an adventure game because that’s what breaking and entering is: finding a way past walls, doors, and locks put there to keep you out. This is especially true for urban exploration: what makes it ‘urban exploration’ rather than a night time stroll is finding a way in to a place someone didn’t want you to go. Being blocked off in an abandoned building can happen at the three layers of time: a place that is always locked, a place that is closed off when it was abandoned, or a place blocked by something that happened in its abandoned state. Each of these states suggest in themselves different puzzles.
Verticality
Here’s a confession, when I write urban exploration, I write from personal experience. I have explored empty buildings in the cities I’ve lived and worked in, and even on holiday, I climb onto rooftops, vault over railings, crawl into vents. In my games, I’ve tried to translate some part of this experience, the wonder and mystery, certainly, but also the verticality.
To get into an abandoned building, most often you have to climb. These places extend upwards and are usually locked off on the ground level. An abandoned tower block in Calm (2011) was modelled directly on an experience of traversing a block of partially-constructed flats: we had to go all the way up one stair case and through a hole in the wall at the top apartment before we could go down another set of stairs back to the main entrance. My experience climbing over a wall to gain entrance to a soon-to-be-demolished mechanics garage was described during one of the vignettes in IFDB Spelunking (2012).
When the Festival Place shopping centre was built in Basingstoke in 2002, it was built over an older outdoor shopping arcade with upper storey concrete walkways. One of these walkways was never demolished, but is preserved, along with some abandoned maisonettes, on the roof of the mall. A normal person would never see this, but someone could visit if they are prepared and able to pull themselves up onto a half-descended service ladder to a shop roof, and then shimmy up in a gap stuffed with air conditioner units, on up to the roof of the shopping centre. This experience inspired one of several ingress points to the Lunarcade in Moondrop Isle.
Lure of Abandonment
Urban Exploration (in real life, but especially in the carefully constructed world of games) allows the interloper to…
- Experience mysteries of a place: what is was, what happened to it, and what it became.
- Solve problems driven by their own curiosity (i.e. how to get in!), and enjoy the thrill of going where one is not meant to go.
- Move through a space in unconventional ways: in windows, up drain pipes, through crawlspaces. Just traversing a place becomes a creative problem to solve.
So to adventure game designers, I say, head out in the night with sensible shoes on and don’t forget to bring a torch!
Far Far Futures 