Bioshock makers join hands in surrealistic Black Glove game

What do you do when the game development company you work for controversially closes up shop? Why band together to make a new game, of course! That is what some of Irrational Games’ writers, artists, and developers, some of the very souls that have labored over Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite, are doing with Black Glove, described as an eerie, surrealistic game that gives a nod to the Arts and takes a few pages out of Bioshock’s book, which is probably part of how its makers plan on making this game sell.

Black Glove’s ties with Bioshock is immediately palpable the moment you are dropped into the game world. Though not as forsaken as Rapture, the game takes place in a building filled with structures, designs, and fashion from the same 1920’s period. But even though the Equinox, the game’s literal and figurative theater, isn’t a crumbling underwater structure, it still feels skewed and wrong, which is the entire premise of the game.

You, dear player, are the latest Curator of the Equinox but you arrive, naturally, to see everything in disarray and decay, well, at least as far as certain artistic tastes go. Your job is to get the theater’s three resident creators, an artist, a film maker, and a musical act, to get back on their feet and do what they do best: create. But how do you do that? By going to their past and playing some games.

To be honest, the gameplay mechanics still need to be fleshed out and explained better. There is talk of using games of skill and chance, like an arcade game, to gain the powers to change the creators’ past. A game within a game, so to speak. Once you do accomplish that, you get the eponymous Black Glove, which you can then use to change one of three things that affect each creator’s present-day output: their Medium, Message, and Muse. Changing any one of those will drastically affect their masterpieces in the present time and the overall look of the Equinox as well as the game itself. This lends Black Glove quite well to replayability, as you can make different decisions and get different outcomes at each playthrough.

Black Glove is a game that still needs a bit of polishing, but that’s OK because it is far from done yet. In fact, right now it is a Kickstarter campaign asking for $550,000. So far it has only managed to raise a tenth of that but there is still 30 days to go anyway. The lowest pledge of $20 is enough to get you a digital download of the game for PC, Mac, or Linux. The game is estimated to launch October next year, but, as experience shows, that is unlikely to happen on time.

SOURCE: Kickstarter