A new game is launching next week in a bid to reclaim the narrative about the Middle East.
Lunacy Studios’ The House of Hikmah is slated to publish on April 8. Set in the Islamic Golden Age, the puzzle game follows the adventures of a 14-year-old girl as she grapples with the fallout of her father’s death. The game is a joint effort between Lunacy Studios and the company’s co-development partners at Side, with a deeply personal narrative directly inspired by Lunacy Studios founder Faris Attieh’s experience of losing his father and the vivid dreams that followed.
“Grief is a universal emotion or experience — it’s a matter of when, not if. Having lost my dad, I buried myself in games and movies, so this is the emotion I had when I was going through it,” Attieh said in an interview with GamesBeat. “So, if one person can play this and feel like they’re understood in some way, then that’s a success to us.”
As geopolitical conflicts continue to rage in the Middle East, Attieh noted the timeliness of a narrative deeply inspired by both the culture and aesthetics of Arab world and the emotion of grief, though he said that The House of Hikmah was in development for years prior to the current spate of violence in the region. Like Ghost of Tsushima, which combined Japanese voice acting with English-language subtitles, The House of Hikmah primarily features Arabic voice acting.
“We’re not making ‘Aladdin,’ right? I don’t want the orientalist view of the Middle East,” Attieh said. “Frankly, I was just tired of seeing the Middle East be the setting and the antagonists of every Call of Duty game — so what better place and time to set it in than the renaissance period of the region?”
The Arabic-heavy voice acting requirements of The House of Hikmah presented a unique challenge for Lunacy Studios’ co-development partners at Side, who handled audio production for the project. Ultimately, the company was able to source all of the voice acting talent it needed locally near Side’s offices in London, with Side benefiting from the diversity of London’s acting community, per Jacob Madsen, the head of Side’s London studio, in an interview with GamesBeat.
“I said to Faris, ‘Look, I know that initially your feeling would be that we need to cast this in Saudi Arabia, but I promise you we can find this in London,’” Madsen said. “We get lots of different kinds of projects, but it’s not always that we get that kind of extra challenge of going, ‘you cannot get this wrong’ — because we owe it to the studio, but we also owe it to Faris to make sure that we get this right.”
As war in the Middle East dominates the news, next week’s launch of The House of Hikmah is looking beyond the headlines to celebrate the culture, scholarship and everyday details of the Arabic world. The game explicitly avoids any elements of violence.
“We stood clear of the hot topics of politics and related stuff like that — but with the reaction that we get from people that have demoed this game, or even during development and playtesting, they are so excited when they get to see a bit of their culture in the game,” Attieh said. “Not that many games are set in this sort of way, and in these sorts of locations.”