Even after watching its trailer, I'm struggling to come up with an appropriate description for Beckett, so for now I'll let developer The Secret Experiment, who advises you come into the game with an open mind, do the talking:
"A disturbing story of a missing-persons investigator, hired to find a young man suffering from a mental illness," Beckett's Steam page reads. "It is a taste of the alternative, an experience that will make you question what it is to exist. It is a vivid musing on identity, memory and loss."
Did you get all that? I hope so, because I've thought of a description of my own. Beckett is a narrative-focused noir game that uses a point-and-click, top-down interface to tell the bizarre story of its titular anti-hero as he pursues a victim of The Soft Paranoia, a disease which warps one's perception of reality (in case the trailer didn't give that away). It's $10 on Steam (just under $9 through Tuesday, March 6), and will take you three to four hours to finish by The Secret Experiment's math.
Beckett was chosen to be showcased in Dundee, Scotland's new Victoria and Albert Museum as "an example of design excellence in storytelling and digital media." The Secret Experiment says it's only "the first in a new-wave of playable fiction." Here's hoping they all look as cool as this:
Random characters kept swearing in Obsidian's font-obsessed murder-mystery when its procedural error system ran amok: 'Naughtiness abounded'
Eagle-eyed streamer spots that Roberta Williams' portrait in King's Quest 4 is based on her author photo on the back of the game box: 'I never noticed it before.'
