What if you could save Hamlet and prevent the tragedy that befell his family in the famous William Shakespeare play? That’s the job of Ophelia, the main character of a unique computer game dubbed Elsinore.
I saw a demo of Elsinore during the Intel Buzz Workshop/Power of Play 2017 event in Bellevue, Washington. It won the award for the most unique game at the indie game contest for the event. It was unique because it depicted an alternate universe for Hamlet, akin to the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day, where the character of the film keeps replaying a single day, trying to get a desired result. It’s part of a narrative genre that is seeing a revival in recent years.
“Elsinore is Hamlet meets Groundhog Day. It’s time-looping Shakespeare,” said Katie Chironis, one of the founders of Golden Glitch, a six-person indie studio creating the game in their spare time. “You play as Ophelia, Hamlet’s ex-girlfriend, and you are trying to stop the tragedy that is going to go down four days from now where all your friends and family are going to murder each other.”
Elsinore takes place over four days in real time. In Elsinore, Ophelia awakes from a bad dream, where she foresees the future tragedy. As Ophelia, you have to try to change fate. You do this by talking to people, eavesdropping on them, telling them what they should know, and changing the way they behave and thereby changing the way the tragedy unfolds.
“Elsinore was born out of the idea of simulating tragedy,” Chironis said.
The studio consists of mostly of Carnegie Mellon alumni who got to know each other through the Game Creation Society, a student club. They ran a successful Kickstarter campaign, raising more than $32,000. But the team is working on nights and weekends, using their own time for the passion project for the past 3.5 years.
Chironis said she is one of those who hated Hamlet in high school, and she hopes that Elsinore will help make Shakespeare more accessible. In that way, she thinks it will succeed with both Hamlet lovers and haters. It reminds me Until Dawn, and in this case, you have to try to keep 20 people from dying.
“I designed the game so you don’t need to know anything about Hamlet,” Chironis said.
Disclosure: Power of Play paid my way to Bellevue. Our coverage remains objective.