14 DAY TRIAL // Independent developer Day For Night Games has just started its crowdfunding campaign for The Black Glove, deemed to be an eerie, surrealistic game experience that dabbles in time travel and the likes.
The main thing to remember is that The Black Glove is an effort spawned by some of the minds who helped craft the engrossing worlds of BioShock and BioShock Infinite, and fill them with creepy and interesting characters and artwork.
The Black Glove's Kickstarter campaign has just gone live, with the developers hoping to raise a total of at least $550k / €436k until November 7.
Pushing the boundaries of the narrative-driven genre
The Black Glove is an attempt to push the envelope when it comes to how narrative and gameplay blend, trying the story directly into gameplay and enabling players to alter both the events and the world around them.
The game takes place inside The Equinox, an eerie theater hailing from the 1920s, a surreal piece of real estate that houses three creators, the artist Marisol, the musical act Many Embers, and the filmmaker Avery Arnault.
Each of the three artists' work is in bad shape, and they need your guidance – or rather influence – in order to discover their true purpose. Of course, your journey is laden with strange metaphysical occurrences, such as time flowing backwards, unearthly music, and dream logic.
Not just passive exploration
Your job as Curator is to change the artists' past in order to alter and hopefully improve their work in the present, by engaging in a series of games of chance and skill, enabling you to interact with the fourth-dimensional space.
You can adjust various aspects of the creators' past, specifically their medium, message or muse, by using The Black Glove at the mysterious Equinox Mirror, a gateway to the past.
The influences on the creators' work can range from 8-bit video game music and '60s era pop art to Day of the Dead and other pieces of folk art, comics, anime, experimental art, cyberpunk fiction, and a wealth of other such stimuli.
Although a narrative-driven affair, The Black Glove's pitch emphasizes gameplay and replayability, in order to distance itself from other such exploratory first-person games that, through their lack of interaction, gained the moniker of "walking simulators."
"The Black Glove is designed to be fun to replay many times over for gamers who want to see and hear everything. Random surreal moments, challenging arcade feats, and dozens of unique narrative scenes and environments will make it a narrative game with surprising replayability," the developers state in the Kickstarter pitch.
