The Bradwell Conspiracy

Uncover the truth with a pair of talking glasses and a 3D printer

TBA

Growing up in Austria in the ’80s, game director and A Brave Plan founder Georg Backer is no stranger to conspiracy. “I remember the Cold War towards the end – it was everywhere,” he says. us. “We were close to West and East Germany, it was in the daily news. It was just one of those things; it was just there. Disinformation, and all that stuff during the Cold War, was really intriguing.” Thus began a lifelong fascination with conspiracies. “I’m not one of those people who says, ‘Oh, the moon landing was fake’,” he says. “But I do often wonder what goes on behind the curtains of big institutes.”

The ex-Lionhead developer’s latest casts you as a visitor to a museum: you clamber through its ruined halls in search of answers. The place is oddly beautiful, in spite of having been blown to bits: half-full champagne glasses twinkle like stars among the remains of a party. “The Mary Celeste was interesting to me,” says art director and narrative designer Holly Pickering. “The boat was left in pristine condition – chairs were pushed over and things, but generally the scene was still as it was. And no one knows what happened.”

This facility honours the Bradwell Institute: exhibits tell of its technological advancements and charitable initiatives. Reading swathes of text on walls creates an uncomfortable tension: we skim it while the building audibly crumbles around us, urging us on. “I think the feeling that you get is actually quite nice, from a design perspective,” Backer says. “The museum was a really good setting to do that.”

There are shades of Gone Home in the unsettling sense that something’s about to pop out at you. Of course, it never does: instead, the floor gives way. Here, The Bradwell Conspiracy takes a turn from creepy walking simulator into droll puzzler, as you pose as an employee to access more of the underground facility. During a humorous, thoroughly corporate induction, you’re given an SMP – a sci-fi tool that lets you use the institute’s greatest (secret) discovery, ‘substance’, to 3D-print objects. It can help solve puzzles, letting you safely cross a room in a game of ‘the floor is lava’, or complete a personality evaluation. It’s all very Portal, then, although Backer assures us that the game opens up in later levels, as you use your new toy to explore parts of the Institute not even the employees are supposed to see. Your museum-guide spectacles are your second tool: unable to speak due to smoke inhalation, you communicate with the personable Dr Amber Randall – who responds to your guide’s distress signal following the explosion – by taking photos of your surroundings. Send her one of a locked door, for instance, and she may be able to help you open it remotely. In the same way that the SMP sidesteps the traditional inventory system, communicating via photos means that pictures are often worth a thousand words. Not that writing the game hasn’t been complex: the object tags and logic trees required for Amber’s reactions to photos are extensive. “It’s worth doing because it actually gives you some immersion if she’s like, ‘That looks like a smaller version of that thing that you sent me before’,” Pickering says. “Those little details make you think, ‘She’s listening to me’.”

Pickering describes herself as “the person with the big cork board and the red string tying everything together,” as she puppeteers the many outcomes behind what you do and don’t share with Amber – you may not want to snap everything you see. “Because the player doesn’t have a voice, there are things they can’t talk about that they would want to, she says. “Then there’s disinformation: maybe you know something she doesn’t know…”

Half-full champagne glasses twinkle like stars among the remains of a party