This week, I played Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist, a short adventure game designed by William Pugh and available to play on Steam. The game is called the “Whirlwind Heist,” but instead of carrying out any real heist as a player, it more so feels like the game that was promised is actually heisted from you, and you become part of the operations behind the game that was originally described. For example, the game thrusts you into a waiting area behind the scenes of a real game, and another character’s voice tells you that you need to wait since someone else is already in the game. From that point, my expectations as a player have already been subverted, and I’m wondering why I’m seeing this space at all.
[Image of room from the opening scene.]
This uncertainty and the following experience of trying to understand the meaning of the environment around me as a player relates to Roland Barthes thoughts in “Death of the Author,” in which Barthes argues that the meaning of a text doesn’t necessarily come from the intentions of the person who wrote it, and that meaning is produced through the way readers interpret and engage with the text. Through its unreliable narration, scattered information, and fourth wall breaks, this game embodies Barthes’ idea of meaning emerging through interaction of people beyond the author, as the game doesn’t just present one conclusive version of the story, it challenges the player to sift through a sensorial experience where the meaning of the game is created and shaped by their decisions.
As I mentioned before, the game immediately creates a sense of uncertainty from the beginning about your role in the world by throwing you into a backroom, shifting the idea you had about what you’d be playing. This is interesting since the “game” disengages from the traditional ideas of a game with a crafted story, and as a player it begins to feel more like a liminal space where I’m questioning what kind of game I’m even in.
I thought it was interesting how the narrator became increasingly unreliable. In the beginning, it seemed like the voice knew what it was doing, but then things in the environment immediately start going wrong and it becomes apparent that there is no actual heist game to be played. Towards the end, he was always improvising solutions as the situation got worse, such as when he gave multiple wrong codes with alarms going off. Sometimes it became confusing whether the narrator was talking to me, or the other “player,” or staff, and I thought that ambiguity was interesting since it also goes against the usual expectations in a game that you must follow the rules or instructions from narrators. Since some games use narrators for tutorials, I originally thought it would be that situation, but I was quickly proved wrong. I felt this especially when I was in the room with the ringing phones and lots of scattered papers. In that experience, there were many moments where the narrator would continue talking and yelling actions, but I was still reading and trying to piece information together. The dialogue from the narrator almost never stops, and can’t really be replayed, so with every decision there is a lot of added pressure and confusion.
[Image of one of the papers next to the ringing phone. ]
After finishing the game though, I realized that that lack of focus and sense of overwhelm as you play is the point. For example, from Barthes’ perspective, the game puts the player in a position to create the meaning of the game by themselves. Because the narrator isn’t reliable, you realize you can’t trust him blindly and you’ll have to figure out for yourself what to read, what to ignore, and what the different layers of the game are saying. This relates to Barthes’ idea about how language speaks, and that the “text’s unity” comes from its destination in the reader. I think the ending with the tiger demonstrates this well, since it is merely a black screen, but just as you start to think you might actually be taken into the real game, it solidified that this deception was indeed the goal all along: someone pulls the wrong lever and releases a tiger on me just as I am about to enter the real game. What makes it really funny is that you as a player have just spent the whole game following the narrator’s instructions, even when they were rushed and confusing, and then this other person completely ignores them and ruins it all at the end.
[Image of the last scene where a tiger is let loose. ]
By that point I already understood that the world was unstable, but the tiger just confirmed that there was never going to be a real game to return to, and the story of Dr. Langeskov comes from the player interacting with the world and the environment as a whole.
Overall, I felt Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist was a very well-designed game. It had comedy and interesting fourth wall breaks, as well as a thoughtful guiding of the player through various environments and pieces of information. I appreciate how different players can decide for themselves how to “play” the game, be it sorting through all the information or purely following the narrator. These unique interactions showcase Barthes’ thoughts on how a work’s meaning can come not purely from the author but from an audience’s experiences engaging with it.
