LogFAQs > #932398302

9. Elsinore (Golden Glitch)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbWsmc1OhOg

On my way to the dungeon for an interrogation I pass by Hamlet in the hall for the first time in days. Hamlet, you see, is a background character in The Adventures of Bernardo and Ophelia: Spyhunter, a prince with an unremarkable arc of vowing revenge and then getting on with it the next day without much fuss.

Of the emerging trend of time loop mysteries in clockwork worlds, Elsinore has to be one of the most ambitious. The thing that would most likely break a game like this is people, and Elsinore lets you influence a bunch of them, driving the plot far from its source material, and weaving a tangled narrative web of dependencies. As indicated above, the entire basis of the play can be resolved on day 1, and there are so many other possibilities like it. As such, the game is an elaborate work of fanfiction, extrapolating for what-ifs, filling narrative gaps, and drawing new connections. Time never stops moving, and you have the freedom to follow whoever you want, so the game must fill in what characters get up to between scenes of the play, which was fun for me as someone who knows the play pretty well. For example, you can discover that Horatio and Gertrude have a friendly relationship that involves occasional walks by the garden, a detail that is not part of the play at all, but for me instantly recalls and contextualizes Horatios presence in the royal court in Act 4 after Hamlet has left for England, and then Im thinking back to other Horatio lines to see how they can be read to support this detail. So yeah, thrilling stuff.

Right, so that is what Hamlet brings to the time loop, but what does the time loop bring back to Hamlet? Perhaps more than Hamlet, a time loop evokes the prophecy in Macbeth, of a future that has become more real than the present, and of an inevitable order reinstated through disorder. Its not like Shakespeare needs help giving weight to tragedy, but a time loop reinforces an eerie sense of inevitability, even through accident and coincidence. The play is so wrapped up in Hamlets shit that we lose sight of how many other problems there are in rotten Denmark, which Elsinore builds on.

Ultimately, this isnt really Shakespeares Hamlet, the character or the play. Characters are changed and expanded considerably, the game has its own themes, and of course, Hamlet isnt even the main character here, Ophelia is. Shakespeares Hamlet is a contradictory character for a contradictory time, who falls apart in the space between himself and his actions, which is why his dilemma is unresolved. But in Elsinore, he along with everyone else, are less characters and more game mechanic. The funny thing about the set-up is that the clockwork world imagines them with fuller lives like real people, but the time loop turns them into programmatic, manipulated signs. Theres a scene in the play where Hamlet gets offended that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern would play him like a pipe, would believe they know his stops, and can predict and control him. This is exactly what you do in Elsinore. Tell Hamlet x after y and he will do z, every time. So yeah, get over yourself Hamlet. Cheer up, you melancholy Dane.

Thinking about it further though, Hamlet would work as a video game character, and the play would work as a video game. Like a video game character, Hamlet is a blackbox, a series of gestures and a costume filling a role, and hiding a lack of any inner essence. Hamlet the play is bloated and occasionally inexplicable, like the midsection filler of a JRPG driven by the need for content and the expectations of a 60-hour playtime. The problem with Hamlet is he lacks an objective correlative according to T.S. Eliot, and why, isnt that just ludonarrative dissonance and wait where are you going

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