That head of lettuce has a caterpillar inside! One of the characters who was once in the army had a set of boots that held a secret that made me understand him a little more when I found it. A sofa will reveal a remote control down the back of it. There is often a bit of cleverness involved in finding the big ticket items - go back to the story, where did it sound like that thing you're after might have ended up? - but there is a human logic to everything else that still manages to surprise and delight. And never has it rewarded in so many little ways. What's behind that? What's underneath that? What's inside it? Never has a game been such a glorious hymn to nosiness. You're looking for the objects you've been sent to find, but really you're just looking. You can select objects within them and then.slice? In you go, sectioning through a wardrobe, a bedside table, a concrete wavebreaker, a head of lettuce. Each area in the game is a set of dioramas for you to pluck out and rotate. Do this enough and the scenes link together and give you a story - a story focusing on an object. You get little disks of scenes, scrambled and warped, and you must use the triggers to move the image left and right, shifting it through various unspooling levels of chaos until it resolves. This works out with a touch of the magic lantern, of an optics experiment to it. Then you move into their heads and unjumble their memories. These are the people who knew the deceased in question. Separate stages! You move to a new setting - a lighthouse, say, or a strip of the seafront, or an ornamental garden - and you rove around looking for people with thought bubbles coming from their heads. This means tracking down people who remember these dead people, and then locating a number of cherished objects that link the memories and the person together. There are a number of candidates for Morris and Sparky to talk to, but first they have to manifest as ghosts. And now they're both back, both ghosts, because Shelmerston's ancient guardian is ready to move on, which means that the volcano will erupt unless another guardian - another dead island resident who wants the big job - is located. I Am Dead casts you as Morris, a man who spent his life on the volcanic island of Shelmerston, running the museum and knocking about with his dog Sparky. What would a child put inside an MRI? What does the inside of a toy car look like? Is there a ship inside this bottle? Wonder! Joy!Īnd there are other valuable emotions as you move outwards. I Am Dead was inspired by a video of a banana in an MRI, and there is something of the MRI's eye, of its unflinching nature to it - something that makes me strangely squeamish, just for a second, as a pass through an orange tree reveals the little baby segments of orange inside, as a slide through an octopus leads me to the private cavities in the unspeakable density of the octopus' head. You can pick up a jar of pencils and rush through the lacquer, the wood, the little pipes of graphite in the middle. You can select a house and slide your eyes through the roof, through the beams, through the floors and right down into the basement, everything from a sofa to a hat-stand strobing past as you go. Its spaces are painted in Mr Men colours but they are thick and chunky and intricate and ready to be turned in the hands and investigated from all angles. It's more like the toys we had as children. Hidden object games are often 2D affairs - here's a beautiful picture, and can you find the haunted earrings, the crank for the Victrola, the keys to that funny Citroen with the odd suspension? They are often an elaboration of the books we had as children: spot this, circle that, where's Wally? Just as we peered down into the campsite itself, roving between its distinct spaces, plucking them out, rotating them, inspecting them. We can peer into Edie's head here, just as we have peered down into her home on the campsite, the roof stripping back as we move closer.
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