The graphics are bright and engaging-in particular, there’s one very cool sequence in a game trailer which sees Alex running through a crowded city street. The turn-based battle system (which includes up to eight players) reminds me of a hipster version of Final Fantasy. The NPCs are meant to be three-dimensional-each has their own story, says Allanson. You explore the world and interact with objects in a way that’s normally reserved for stories told in fantasy settings. YIIK really does feel like an old-school RPG. Or rather it is the game is meant as a satire of the nostalgia that seems pervasive in games right now, says Allanson. In some ways, I didn’t recognize the world I was looking at in the demo (1999’s male college grads were not the bearded hipsters of today and arcades were already a rarity) and in some ways, I did (people wearing a lot of black were, in fact, the ones most likely to push a photocopied ‘zine on you, and god, yes, hacky sacks were everywhere).īut ’90s nostalgia really isn’t the point of the game. Playing YIIK is supposed to be a surreal experience, but it’s extremely surreal for someone who is contemporary with the game’s characters. So he made an RPG in which characters do exactly that, and instead of a sad, mundane truth, they discover something supernatural and enter an eerie world filled with giant robots, weird enemies, and abductees. They do, and they encounter… something supernatural. Conspiracy theorists would have to actually have to go full X-Files: leave their desktop computers and investigate the mystery in person. You’d be lucky to have a video at all (and you’d probably have to download it to your desktop as a QuickTime file, which could take foreeeeeever with a modem, but I digress).Īllanson began to imagine what it might like to investigate a similar mystery back in 1999, when everyone was worried about the world ending/computers crashing on Jan. The viral video of Lam leaving the elevator, information about the hotel, every news report on Lam’s disappearance, and Lam’s social media was all available to any sleuth interested in solving the mystery from home.īack in 1999, that amount of information simply wasn’t online. It quickly occurred to Allanson, however, that he-and the other truthseekers who were obsessed with Lam’s death-had access to a lot of information. “For a while, I convinced myself that I’d figured it out,” he said. Ackk director Brian Allanson was one of the many people who paid close attention to the mystery of Lam’s death at the time. If this plot sounds a lot like the death of Elisa Lam, who disappeared from a hotel elevator in 2013 (a disappearance documented in a viral video) only to be found later, drowned in the hotel’s water tank, it’s no coincidence. They are all-for their own reasons-obsessed with solving one particular mystery a young woman named Sammy Pak has gone missing, pulled from a hotel elevator in a video that has gone viral. He turns out to be one of eight friends who meet through online message boards. The game focuses on Alex, a young man who has-as I mentioned earlier-come home from college in 1999. It’s an ironic look at nostalgia, gaming, and the classic RPG format. After all, I graduated from college in 2000, just a year after the game’s protagonist comes home from college to find himself facing both adulthood and a terrible mystery.įirst, let me say that YIIK, a turn-based Japanese-style RPG, developed by AckkStudios for Ysbrd Games, is a slick trip down memory lane. Playing the YIIK: A Postmodern RPGdemo at PAX East in March was a little weird for me.
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