Nouvelle Église [english]

Since this autumn, I've been working on a text-based game in Basic, for the Amstrad CPC, which will allow the player to wander through a semi-rural neighborhood on the outskirts of a city; this neighborhood is where I grew up. In it, I reproduce with the greatest possible topological realism the tangle of streets, alleyways, wastelands, orchards and fields where I spent my childhood, which I explored from top to bottom, and which today in part no longer exist. I could have done it in Inform and that would undoubtedly have had its charm; but by resorting to Basic and the aesthetics of the Amstrad, I've brought together content and form, since at the same time I owned a 6128 and today the lost scenery of my childhood and that of the few adventure games I played are one and the same in my memory. The game is displayed in Mode 2, which I don't usually like, but which here gives the text, smaller than in Mode 1, something colder, more "computerized" (it makes no sense, but that's how I perceive it) and this is further accentuated by the gray background I've chosen. Grey like the sky, like the stones, like the concrete. The coldness of the technique and at the same time the comforting greyness of the sky in this region, a greyness that I feel is my childhood home, just like certain styles of houses or a certain way of arranging landscapes. Strictly speaking, there's nothing to do in the "game", nothing to win, and no mystery to unravel. But certain actions will act as triggers, opening up new locations or triggering scenes here and there on the map. It will be, for anyone who isn't me, a completely cryptic experience, and that's just fine.