“ We're portraying everything as it was. We're not candy-coating it.

Assassin’s’ Creed III has demonstrated a desire among gamers to play around with the turbulent history of the United States, even to question (albeit obliquely, in that game) jingoistic, sanitized certainties about a story that intertwines liberty with slavery and the benefits of exploration, expansion and opportunity with the crimes of invasion, genocide and cultural extermination. Meriwether , currently nearing the end of a Kickstarter appeal, seeks to explore one of the most fascinating episodes in America’s story, the Corps of Discovery Expedition by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, to map a route from the newly formed United States - essentially a conglomeration of former British colonies in Atlantic North America - to the far-distant Pacific.The game is tackling a difficult subject, the tale of a two-year-long slog that involved much fewer opportunities for staged combat scenarios than you might think. But it has many supporters. The Kickstarter looks set to hit its target, and media reports have been positive. Rock Paper Shotgun says the concept is “absolutely fascinating”.As Joshua DeBonis, head of indie developer Sortasoft explains, “We’re doing this because it’s something that we love. This is not a game that's rooted in a commercial background. We hope to pay our expenses, but we're really doing it because we know that this is a game that needs to be made. It brings something new to the canon of the story.” This adventure is no shooting rampage down a white-water version of the Missouri, Sioux and buffalo being mown down by hyper-tooled muskets. It’s a game of discovery, of exploration, of characters and of solving puzzles. It’s an RPG rooted in the same problems faced by the 30+ men and one woman who travelled from St. Louis to the Pacific coast and back, between 1804 and 1806, encountering along the way a bounty of unfamiliar plant-life, fauna, geography and, of course, people.DeBonis says, “It's a role-playing game with exploration elements. You're exploring procedurally-generated terrain, filled with all kinds of really amazing, interesting characters that happen to be based on real people. They're incredible characters. It's an incredible world. And there's this amazing story to it that's not very well-known. It plays very much like a fantasy RPG in that there is this great world-building that's happening. It just happens to be rooted in history.”The game’s main prongs are the characters in the Corps, headed by Lewis; the trappers and natives Americans met along the way and the West itself, before the invasions and settlements of the 19th Century, and the subsequent development of the most powerful nation on Earth. Lewis and Clark opened up that path, and through them, we are allowed to see the fearful possibilities of “manifest destiny” and the beauty of a doomed civilization. It’s an important thing for us to understand, particularly those of us who benefit now, directly, from its undertaking.Games like Meriwether, when they are done right, allow us to understand this journey and its implications in different ways than books and TV documentaries. They make the player decide whether or not to, say, intervene in a dispute between the Hidatsa and the Arikara or how to persuade Shoshone to trade their horses. These things happened and now we get a chance to glimpse or sense what it might have been like, at least for the American explorers.DeBonis and his team seem like good candidates to realize such a project, which has been aided by grants and by Kickstarter. “We're all obsessed with this story. It's a topic that we’ve gone into so deeply. I've gone to all of these Lewis and Clark conventions. The people there are so interesting, knowledgeable and really friendly. So many people get into the story and have a unique perspective on it. They want to share their knowledge and their expertise."But does all this make for a good game? “I found that a lot of gamers are really interested in exploration. It's very game-like in general. As they start to learn about this game, they really get into the Lewis and Clark story specifically.” Of course, the age of discovery, from Portuguese galleys creeping down the coast of West Africa, to British men-of-war appearing off the surf of Tahiti, inspires much in the sci-fi-dominated orb of video game narratives, of plunging into the unknown and grappling with the strange and alien. Star Trek is, at its core, Lewis and Clark, the duo of cool, enlightened mind and impulsive warrior, imposing the world-view that they share on whatever life-forms they happen across. President Jefferson, admirable, learned Founding Father , instigator of the mission, is Starfleet Command, except for the bit where he owns some human beings who he uses as unpaid farm-workers, and more And this is where Meriwether and all things Lewis and Clark crash through the gentle rushes of Missourian splendor, into the trampled clearing of 19th Century notions of white superiority, the right to own people, to take their land because of their physical differences and the evidential inferiority of their technology.DeBonis says there’ll be no dodging the difficult issues. “We're portraying everything as it was, and we're not candy-coating it. These characters act as they did in the early 1800s. You just can't treat the topic with a modern perspective. The game just won't let you.”In other words, there’s no time-portal where you, 21st Century nice-guy, get to appear in the Mandan villages to liberate Clark’s slave York, or somehow give Sacagawea , the native teenage bride of a French trapper, some real life-choices, or warn the locals that machines much like the impressive guns these white guys are showing off, will soon be pointed at their kids.There is a story-arc involving York, who is deeply affected by the liberty he inevitably enjoys as part of a tight-packed team of explorers, and the very real likelihood that this shaped events in his life, when he returned to the East. The complexities of this age, and the inconsistencies of the explorers’ position is embodied in the game through Lewis’ personality facets of leader, diplomat, soldier, scientist and melancholy, which players use and improve in dialog situations. Lewis was a complicated character, one of the heroes of his age who likely died by his own hand, a gentleman of the enlightenment, interested in the world around him, for whom happiness was elusive. He is a long way away from being someone as two-dimensional as a standard video game leading man.“We try to portray him in a way that's true to history,” says DeBonis. “But also, we don't try to glorify it. Lewis is a hero in the sense that he's the protagonist of this game. But we don't really say whether he's a good guy or a bad guy. We try to allow the player to decide that for themselves. Everything in this game is all about those gray areas.”If the morality of Lewis’ position is gray, at least to us, the world he inhabits is certainly not. Perhaps the game’s greatest attraction will be in the beauty of the world it seeks to portray, the abundance and nature of the American West.DeBonis says, “We know that the game can't really convey the same grandeur that the real landscape actually provides, but we try to hint at it as much as possible. Almost the entire game is set outdoors, in large landscapes. You do a lot of traveling over large areas.“We want it to look good, but mainly we want it to have that feeling of just being a very large space that's largely untouched by man. But there are a lot of people living in certain areas. The assumption is that you're going into this completely virgin territory, when actually people have been living here for a very long time and have enormous villages and culture built up around them.“One thing we're trying to do is break a lot of misconceptions about the story. They didn't discover the Pacific. They just went there a different way.”

Colin Campbell interviews and writes about games pretty much every weekday. For updates and commentary, follow on Twitter or at IGN