The closest I have come to having any interest in sport is when I got really into reading about football hooligans, or like, Blood Bowl, but I do absolutely recognise the romance of it all. SUDDEN DEATH is a delicious free slice of playable art-pie that celebrates that romance. It is – says dev Cécile, who co-made the project with Nat Pussy and MOTHER GOOSE for collective Domino Club – “a game about love and sports. it’s gay, it’s very australian, and it’s great.” You can tell it’s Australian quickly, because people call chips ‘chippies’, which makes me chuffed.
It’s interactive fiction, but uses mixed media to tell its tale of love, drugs, and footy, jumping between authorial prose, conversations, online news articles, comment sections, and text messages. It sometimes feels like being allowed a look at an evidence file of snapshots leading up to the terrible event you suspect might be coming.
Conversation are chatty and breezy, but both the prose and visual style are just that bit slanted and haunted, and its punkish, DIY exterior contains a lot of genuine warmth. At one point, one character makes a joke to another, and that person just laughs for a while in response. I honed in on this because this is sort of dialogue I like, where jokes don’t just act as quips for the audience, but as shared moments between people.
The actual football of it all is presents as made by devs who do love sports but are deeply aware their audience might not. So the match is brought to life through experimental UI elements like a pulsating radar and a ‘pressure gauge’. It’s super inventive, channeling the “elegant gibberish,” of the oft used quote from author Don Delilo, with the details of the match presented as a movie script to a background of wobbly techno.
I think it’s cool, and you might too. You can play it in your browser, via Itch.
