The bell is for me and not for you.
If you’re anything like me, the idea of going back to school fills you with dread.
What is it that makes these games so compelling?
It allows for a more mature take on the formula of juggling school-work, relationships, and decking demons.
Most similar games, however, skew younger.
It’s easy to see why.
With overblown and overwhelming emotions, teenagers can make the smallest moments appear more profound.
Annika Maar,game director of Kraken Academy!
Still, you’d think setting a game in a place of learning would feel staid by now.
“A lot in our lives changes in a very short amount of time,” Maar says.
But that chaos doesn’t just make a good foundation for video game formulae.
Interactive media is unique for its potential for tangible escapism.
An escape into experiences to which we can meaningfully relate, in worlds that feel both uncanny and familiar.
It’s something that was important to developerJae Yoo when creating Eternights.
That so many developers include the supernatural in these games is no coincidence, either.
Consider how relatable Stranger Things is.
It’s not because we’ve been harassed by creatures from another dimension.
Nor is it nostalgia for the 1980s.
Rather, the creatures that haunt 80s and 80s-inspired horror are emblematic of those anxieties.
The same is true for games like Demonschool.
For as long as there have been human beings, there has been anxiety-driven horror.
In the modern world, few horrors are as relatable as our teenage experiences.
“Both real and imagined.”
And this is something that games, crucially, never make us do alone.
We view our younger years as a period of singularly intense upheaval.
But we never really stop changing.
Those years may be more volatile and that might make them the perfect video game fodder.
But even in our twenties and thirties, we’re going through just as much chaotic polymorphism.
Why then wouldn’t we gravitate towards stories that make us feel part of a group?
That retrospective agency, even as we grow older, is important.
Games can’t let us doanything- not yet.
But they can reaffirm that sense of possibility in a static and repeatable reminder of a simpler time.
One that becomes invaluable against the anxieties and pressure of simply being an adult in the modern world.
It’s tempting to ascribe my own love of these games to a desire to rewrite the past.
It’s not so much about the past, than how the past can inform the future.
