The world of independent video games is littered with narrative experiences of ambitious emotional scope. With their latest creation THE WRECK, French studio The Pixel Hunt wanted to deal head-on with the consequences and fear of grief in a deeply moving video game.
We follow Juno, a young woman at her mother’s hospital bedside after her mother suffers a stroke. The thirty-something is surprised to learn that she is responsible for her mother’s medical treatment, even though her prognosis is life-threatening. The relationship between the two has been conflictual since childhood. Fleeing the situation, she decides to leave the hospital and take her car, only to find herself in an accident that brings back all her memories.
We explore these memories with Juno’s voice-over, unlocking her various moods by clicking on words in the background. As the story progresses, the secrets of this deeply dysfunctional family are revealed. Halfway between visual novel and point & click, THE WRECK is a game to read and feel. This first accident conceals another, inspired by the personal story of the game’s creator, Florent Maurin.
The gameplay loop tends to emulate the various epiphanies of Juno’s character, linked to her personal and family history. The game’s themes are tough, but they’re dealt with justly, without any maudlin tones: while the gameplay mechanics are minimalist, they’re at the service of an emotional impact that’s dizzying in its universality, whether we’re talking about family, couples or resilience in the face of trauma. In this respect, the game is a modest French little brother to WHAT REMAINS of Edith Finch, which also explored the tragic destinies of the various members of a family with well-kept secrets.
We put a few questions to Florent Maurin, president of The Pixel Hunt studio and co-writer of the game.
Where did the idea for THE WRECK come from, and how did your personal life influence the writing of the game?
There are several origins, in fact. Ever since I became a parent, I’ve been haunted by the agonizing thought of losing a child. To tell the truth, I think it’s present in everyone in my situation, but most of the time, we prefer not to think about it too much, and instead brush it under the carpet – which is quite understandable!
But a few years ago, while taking my second daughter to nursery school, I was involved in a car accident. Luckily for us, we escaped unhurt, but the event shook me to the core, and I experienced what I had previously thought was a film trope: I saw moments of my life flash before my eyes, as the accident unfolded in “slow motion”.
It was this experience, and a reflection on the impact it might have had on my life, that gave rise to the story of THE WRECK. What’s more, I wrote this story with my sister Coralie. And while it’s far from autobiographical, we nevertheless drew on our shared family history, which during our teenage years was rather complicated.
How did you come up with the game design after writing the story? Were you already thinking about it when you wrote, or did the structure come later?
A first structure came to me immediately after my accident. In this version, the whole game took place in the accident in slow motion, with objects flying around the main character and functioning as doorways to memories – without you ever leaving this “in the wash” position of the car being destroyed. But while the idea was conceptually interesting, in reality it wasn’t as convincing as we’d hoped – our first prototype taught us that.
So we went back to the drawing board, and came up with the current structure, which functions a bit like a time loop, and in which memories are also loops. This second structure, though perhaps a little more conventional, was clearly more effective in serving our design objective: to offer the player a deep dive into the psyche of our main character, Juno.
You’re proposing an updated version of THE WRECK. What does the video game medium bring to a story like this, compared with a novel or film, for example?
For me, these are two totally different experiences. The novelized version of THE WRECK (called Dans un Ciel serein) opens a window onto a lost, dazed character, who struggles for 300 pages to get her life back on track. The video game, on the other hand, puts you in a fighting position: it’s up to you, through your actions, to push her into her darkest depths. The gameplay invites you to make her go to the end of her thoughts, to dissect her memories in search of clues to understand everything about her life, and, at the very end, to choose the conclusion you feel best suits her story. In the end, the videogame experience is far more hopeful than that of reading the novel, because in the game, you embody the heroine’s vital drive, and without you she won’t make it.
