Wayward Strand
PC
One of the more heartening recent developments in the game industry has been the opportunity to hear from a wider range of voices. Through art funds, boutique publishers and independent stores such as itch.io, creators from different backgrounds are getting the help they need to bring more personal projects to market, and it’s becoming easier to broaden our cultural diet.
Still, even without knowing a great deal about Australia in the 1970s, we’re sure that airships converted into hospitals were never a thing. “Actually…” Ghost Pattern Games’ Marigold Bartlett begins, before her poker face breaks into a grin.
“In terms of the time period, I think a really big thing was just that we were excited to find out more about it,” designer and writer Jason Bakker adds. “Because it feels like, even in Australia and Australian media, the ’70s…” Bartlett finishes his sentence: “…are missing.”
Though it was, they say, a fraught time for the country, that’s hardly reflected in the opening half-hour of Wayward Strand, which is gentle, touching and quietly funny in places. You are Casey, a curious teenager who agrees to help out her mother aboard this floating hospice, while taking notes from her chats with its patients for a newspaper article she plans to write about her experience. Already, we’ve got a few favourites: Ida, played by Anne Charleston (who soap fans may recognise as Madge from Neighbours), is warm and friendly, while we’re intrigued to find out more about former actress Tomi – a Berlinale winner in her time.
Casey’s role, Bakker says, took time to define as the developer worked out how to align the player’s goals with that of the protagonist. This way, he says, “you have an impetus to talk to all the characters” and find out more about them, which is ultimately what the story is about. “That’s been one of the cornerstones of our design meetings over the years,” Bartlett adds. “We want to make Wayward Strand a pleasant, engaging time. But we also don’t necessarily want to heavily gamify these three hours.” It’s designed to have a satisfying conclusion regardless of how you choose to spend your time – or, rather, who you spend it with.
Bakker says one original inspiration was Inkle’s 80 Days, yet it has more in common with the British studio’s murder mystery Overboard, at least from a structural standpoint. Here, as there, NPCs have their own routines (which, Bakker says, was about “allowing the other characters increased agency”) that may or may not dovetail with your movements. But rather than clicking on a cross-section of the ship – and through lines of text – the place is rendered physically, with the characters visibly (and audibly) moving around. It has the feel of a theatrical set, albeit one where walls can melt away so you can see inside the various rooms.
So was it annoying or validating when Overboard came out? “Cheeky buggers,” Bartlett says, affectionately. “We love the team over there. And it was exciting more than anything else. It was a clever design, and I think if there are people who really enjoyed that for the experience of the time[-based] stuff, then we can offer them this encyclopaedic version of it.”
Above all, it’s a chance for these developers to “define ourselves in our terms”, as Bartlett puts it, referring to the theory of the Australian Cultural Cringe – how the dominance of American and European culture has given voices from beyond those spheres an inferiority complex about their work. “I don’t know if this is the Cringe speaking or if this is how I actually feel, but I don’t think I would want to say that Wayward Strand isn’t relatable to other people? I think I just have to accept that it’s totally natural and just Australian to doubt that.” Whether they believe us or not, if our short stay in this delightful world is anything to go by, Ghost Pattern has nothing to cringe about.
One original inspiration was 80 Days, yet it has more in common with Overboard