Beckett

Beckett is a top-down, narrative adventure game that follows an ageing private investigator, whose brain is riddled with disease and hallucinations, on his final case. This is an original IP by The Secret Experiment; a new work of paranoid fiction set in a world of high-contrast and extremes, where beauty is misunderstood and the human desire to control is captured in a society that wears insects as living jewellery. Beckett himself is from a different era and doesn’t conform to typical notion of the hero. He is a character with bad hygiene, who has let go of life and is tormented by memories of his dead wife - a back story the player will unpick over the course of the game.

The story is told on a visual landscape that defies description, where each location is painted as a reflection of our main character’s emotional state - a subjective morphing of the place, its objects and characters. As such, this is a game that engages the player’s imagination and - like a good book - allows the audience to become an integral part of the experience.

Tonally, the experience echoes David Lynch’s Eraserhead, David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch and Cohen Brother’s No Country For Old Men. It has an emotional maturity and depth of content that isn’t normally found or associated with games. And with its unique art style and innovative interaction mechanics, we hope Beckett catch the attention of players who are after more than just an adrenaline rush.

The Player controls Beckett though a familiar point-and-click style interface. However, there’s no tenuous pixel hunting or obscure logic puzzles here. The game system has been designed to draw the player in and keep them there - not d i s l o c a t i n g t h e e x p e r i e n c e w i t h unnecessary elements. This isn’t to say that Beckett doesn’t have a rich pallet of interactivity and thought-provoking mechanics, however. The interaction system has been tailored to the story and every element is designed to underpin its emotional beats - the player will be called upon to interact in a number of different ways. The end result is something that feels tactile and human - in many ways un-game-like. The experience itself lasts around 2 hours, but with a high-proportion of evocative archive and textual content that could extend this duration. Notions of Choice and Chance are present throughout the experience - where the player is called upon to sway Beckett’s reactions to certain situations and play a part where skill is necessary. These moments add to the overall flow of the narrative and will ultimately shape the end of the story (or at least the options that are open to Beckett at the end).

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