Brain Box – The Safe Space text adventure game
(strangemachine.tv)20 points by durakot 3 days ago
20 points by durakot 3 days ago
Late to finding out about the HN mention, but I made this! And yes, it's an adaptation of the entire movie, but with the twist of making every character the 'main' character.
There's a text-based adventure in the movie that the characters play briefly, so this riffs on that. Happy to answer any questions.
Does the game "spoil" the movie? Like, is the movie's entire plot included or is it more of a prologue? And were you involved with the movie?
It's a neat idea with beautiful execution and I hope it gets more attention in other places than it got here. I'm not even sure what genre it is. It's not a game in the sense of requiring the player to solve anything, more of a novel in which the reader chooses a perspective and shapes the narrative but (AFAICT) cannot really direct the plot. Was the author of the game's text the same writer as the movie's plot and dialogue?
edit to add, also, was this built with an existing interactive fiction engine or was the site custom coded?
The entire plot of the movie is included. You could play through entire story, but in practice that would take a very long time, even with digressions -- and even then, it would be the story just through a specific character's perspective.
The idea was to make something that stood alongside the movie as a companion piece, an alternative way of experiencing it, rather than just a promotional thing. It's been fun seeing players playing for 4+ hours and barely getting through the first half, when the movie itself is 90 minutes and change.
I may try to post a Show HN later this week with more details, since the technical details are kind of fun. It's fully custom-coded and uses some LLMs under the hood (more as a 'game master' than in a creative capacity). I worked with the writer/director of the film to translate the script to a more interactive-friendly format, but he basically did the interactive adaptation himself.
I worked on the movie as a technical consultant and they credited me as 'unix wrangler' (I can check having an imdb page off my bucket list I guess)...
Easter eggs if anyone finds this and reads this far: try typing 'chloe' or 'camus' in the character selection screen.
As interactive fiction this is very well executed. I'm some part of the way through the story from one character's perspective so I don't know how far it goes, but is this a (for lack of a better word) novelization of the entire plot of the movie? And did you make it?