There’s that lovely expression for a certain kind of thinking: I’m just turning it over in my head. The good cliches have a sort of power of youth to them – they remain unbanished, unbanishable. Just turning it over. The millionth time you hear it it’s as pleasing as the first time. Why? A sense of cooking, of laundry perhaps, of rocks spattering around inside the cool tube of a polisher on their way to becoming smooth. But also, the hands are invoked: thinking about something, focussing on it, turning it back and forth through the air, seeing how it feels with the fingers, noticing how it catches the light, testing the weight of the thing. Thinking with hands, with eyes.
Anyway: I Am Dead, which is coming soonish to Switch and PC, announces itself as a game about being dead. You play someone who’s dead and who encounters a lot of other dead people on a quest to uncover the secret that threatens the island where they all used to live. There’s even a pet dog in it who’s also dead. Sparky, he’s called, which may or may not be a Peanuts reference. I certainly hope so.
But I Am Dead’s actually a game about turning things over, about looking at things from different angles. It’s about memory and perspective, and it’s also about the pieces that games are made of and, I think, perhaps the tools that make those pieces. And it’s about the pieces that people are made of. Dead people sometimes. And their dogs.
There’s that lovely expression for a certain kind of thinking: I’m just turning it over in my head. The good cliches have a sort of power of youth to them – they remain unbanished, unbanishable. Just turning it over. The millionth time you hear it it’s as pleasing as the first time. Why? A sense of cooking, of laundry perhaps, of rocks spattering around inside the cool tube of a polisher on their way to becoming smooth. But also, the hands are invoked: thinking about something, focussing on it, turning it back and forth through the air, seeing how it feels with the fingers, noticing how it catches the light, testing the weight of the thing. Thinking with hands, with eyes.Anyway: I Am Dead, which is coming soonish to Switch and PC, announces itself as a game about being dead. You play someone who’s dead and who encounters a lot of other dead people on a quest to uncover the secret that threatens the island where they all used to live. There’s even a pet dog in it who’s also dead. Sparky, he’s called, which may or may not be a Peanuts reference. I certainly hope so.But I Am Dead’s actually a game about turning things over, about looking at things from different angles. It’s about memory and perspective, and it’s also about the pieces that games are made of and, I think, perhaps the tools that make those pieces. And it’s about the pieces that people are made of. Dead people sometimes. And their dogs.Read moreEurogamer.net
