The author | Snow Night Maple Scales
A fortune teller, a novice detective who has just entered the police station, and the two join forces to find the truth behind the "three-eyed prodigy" hidden in the 1990s. Unexpectedly, a supernatural force brought the novice detective back to the nineties, back to the video hall where the tragic event occurred. However, what is more distorted than time and space is always the human heart.
This is the plot in the domestic game "Three Volts". On March 21, the game officially launched a demo version, which immediately attracted the attention of players. Many UP masters have produced video of the demo process, which further boosted the popularity of the game and once again focused on the game maker Moonlight Cockroach.
From the beginning of Hesse-cho tan, the story of the moonlight cockroach has become the essence of his game. This combination of storytelling and interaction is further developed in "Fireworks", and it also allows us to learn about a family tragedy through a small funeral arson case.
The same is true of the current "Three Volts". As a suspenseful reasoning game with horror elements, "Three Volts" starts from small events and faces the greater pain of the times.
Since 2018, horror games in the field of Independent Games in China have begun to show a trend of blowout. "Paper Man", "Hong Kong Trick Record", "Paper Wedding Dress", and of course, "Fireworks" made by Moonlight Cockroach.
These horror games are getting more and more attention from players, and the most rudimentary requirement of fright has long been unable to meet the needs of ordinary players, and people hope to get a deeper demand from these stories, that is, to give real social problems, to find an outlet for release.
Horror games are inherently competitive with fragmented narratives over other games. Through a good story that can stand up, layer by layer, the layers are stripped away, taking the player to a more immersive story. Gamers like Moonlight Cockroach have further innovated the narrative structure and interactive design of horror games, and established their own art style, ultimately making horror games the best narrative method for realistic themes.
Why do players love stories like Fireworks and Three Volts? What genre story can finally hit the player's pain points? If you want to increase the immersion of your game, what do you need to do in areas such as narrative structure, art style, and interactive design? Taking advantage of the launch of the "Three Volts" Demo, the Prophet Travels to the game's author Moonlight Cockroach, hoping to get the answer to the question from his mouth.
01 What do players like about "Three Volts"?
How popular is "Three Volts"?
Open the B station, in just one week, dozens of UP masters have produced a live video of the "Three Volts" Demo. Among them, the live video of up and running away people has been played as high as 1.28 million, entering the top fifteen of the site's rankings.
Underneath the live video of the idle people, many players continue to analyze the plot and dig into the small details buried in the game by the game author. Some players find that the reason why the conductor has been unable to move with his back to the camera when talking to the protagonist's line is because his body has been sealed in the wall and cannot move.
For example, when the two protagonists chiseled through the wall and found two corpses, flowers and plants in the shape of "Y" grew on the corpses. After the player's examination, this flower and grass is called "Cicada Flower Cordyceps". Ming Dynasty Li Shizhen's "Compendium of Materia Medica" (1590) records: "Cicada flowers can cure eclampsia, crying at night, and performing the same work as cicadas." Interestingly, the phrase "the cicada dies, the cicada flower breaks the ground" is written on the poster of the game, which echoes the tragic fate of the "three-eyed child".
On Weibo, there was also a lot of discussion about the plot of "Three Volts". Fanfiction is naturally essential, and there are even players in "Collection! In "Animal Forest Friends", the scene in "Three Volts" was also restored.
So, what exactly do players love about Three Volts?
A'an is an old fan of the Moonlight Cockroach, and all three of the works produced have been studied. She told the prophet that "Hesse-cho Chi Tan" to "Fireworks" can be said to be the transformation process of the moonlight cockroach, and "Three Volts" just inherits the temperament of "Fireworks".
Fireworks is a full game, while Three Volts now has only one Demo. None of them have complex and torturous puzzles, but more gripping is a deeply charming story, coupled with some of the more terrifying bridges. "Three Volts" only unveiled the tip of the iceberg of the story to people, which is enough to attract a large number of players to wait another year for the finished game to come out.
Aan confessed to the prophet that her first experience of "Fireworks" was not played by hand, but watched the UP main live broadcast. When she learned what kind of story this was, the plot of the game alone could not satisfy her, and she could not truly understand the story by experiencing more interactive elements in person. While chatting with A-an, she has completed Fireworks at least 10 times and explored every interactive element of the game in detail.
Last year, Wuyuan Culture deliberately chose to adapt "Fireworks" into a TV series on teachers' day, which also caused a lot of heated discussion. Judging from the film and television works launched by Wuyuan Culture in recent years, whether it is "Sweeping The Black Storm" or "White Night Pursuit", they are works that strive to be close to the current reality of society, and the theme of "Fireworks" is exactly like this.
However, fans are worried about whether the game's two-line narrative and symbolism can be restored by the TV series 1:1, and Aan is a member of the skeptic camp.
"There is a passage in the game where, in order to reflect the character's inner torment, the picture used is even in hell where one side is burned by fire and the other side is facing the guillotine. Such a symbolist design, it feels like an ordinary TV series to adapt, very difficult. In particular, the main line is classified into the theme of the TV series or criminal investigation drama, and it is even more difficult to restore similar scenes," Aan said.
02 Horror genre + social reality theme, hitting the mainstream emotions of society
The super popularity of "Fireworks" and "Three Volts" proves that stories close to social reality are still the most needed story themes. Especially when the common film and television works can not touch more on the relevant themes, the value of the game is highlighted.
In fact, if you want to create these stories, you need developers to have enough perception of the current social reality and be able to convey them to the audience through their own delicate brushstrokes. The Moonlight Cockroach does just that.
The moonlight cockroach's perception of social reality is very obvious in "Fireworks". In a game with a process of just a few hours, we can see the problem of superstition, the problem of doctor-patient disputes, the problem of abducting women and children, and the allocation of educational resources. These problems are condensed in the two cases of funeral arson and the door-killing massacre, and connect the main story of "Fireworks". Reflecting social problems, behind it is the moonlight cockroach's concern for social reality.
Talking about the creation of "Three Volts", Moonlight Cockroach said that the origin of the story of "Three Volts" is two real social events.
In 2019, Moonlight Cockroach saw a video of "quantum fluctuation speed reading" on the Internet, and many elementary school students were quickly flipping through a book, asking them to memorize the contents of a book in a short period of time and repeat it. The training institutions that held the competition put up slogans, claiming that they could enable elementary school students to achieve such "miracles".
Equally absurd is a paper from last year in which authors Guo Ping and Yin Damin said that they could "resurrect hard-boiled eggs", and they have also "demonstrated" this process in various offline seminars many times. When the paper "boiled egg rejuvenation" became popular on the Internet, the two authors were naturally greeted with endless apologies and the "Beijing Relativity Research Association" behind them was banned.
Both of these social events had a great impact on the Moonlight Cockroach, so he decided to create a work about the chaos of specific functions. In the process of searching for information, Moonlight Cockroach discovered the "qigong fever" of the 1990s, and the background of that era was very consistent with what he wanted to express now. This has also become the inspiration for the current story of "Three Volts".
In addition to the social problems we mentioned earlier, the wave of layoffs in the nineties is also an unavoidable topic. Lao Tian's dismissal from the bank can be said to be a fuse of the Tian family's massacre. Many of the social tragedies caused by the wave of layoffs still have a realistic reflection today, such as the wave of layoffs in large factories under the new crown epidemic.
Moonlight Cockroach believes that his passion for reflecting social reality stemmed mainly from reading a large number of speculative fiction novels in college, especially social works. Works of sociological speculative fiction may not have subtle tricks, but will pay more attention to the revelation of social problems. This is precisely why Keigo Higashino's novels have become regulars on the annual best-seller list.
The wave of layoffs, superstition, doctor-patient disputes, and child trafficking, these reflections on social reality, eventually merged with the horror genre and became what "Fireworks" looks like today.
Whether it is qigong fever or the wave of layoffs, the content of collective consciousness and social pain is still a relatively difficult topic for today's film and television adaptation, or it needs to be handled more carefully. But in the field of gaming, even in horror games, people are getting rid of such shackles.
In the development and evolution of horror films, the collision between traditional culture and modernity has always been the main topic of discussion for directors. Traditional culture has experienced the impact of modernity, which has created new confusions, while cultural subjects face deeper identity anxieties.
For example, the movie "Dumplings", although the ostensible story is a past actress who is worried that she is old and fading and cannot win the favor of rich businessmen, and finally chooses to eat the dumplings wrapped in the baby fetus, thus falling deeper and deeper. In fact, what the director wants to express is the confusion and anxiety that many people have when they face their new identities.
Still, mainstream horror audiences care about how frightening the film meets their requirements. Today's horror games go far beyond ordinary horror movies. Whether the content presented in the game is surreal and whether it conforms to science is no longer important to the story itself, and the social reality theme that the author wants to convey is the key to the final direct access to the hearts of such games.
03 Three major means to enhance immersion and receive social reality
Relying solely on the story of social reality, "Fireworks" and "Three Volts" could not gain today's popularity. The cinematic narrative structure, the art style that fits the temperament of the story, and the exquisite interactive design, these important experiences that belong to horror games further enhance the sense of immersion, so that the audience of non-horror games can have a deeper understanding of the social reality that the author wants to convey.
Traditional horror games, especially survival horror games, often choose fragmented narratives, and slowly outline the whole story by constantly dodging monsters. The Moonlight Cockroach chose another path, that is, to use film and television narrative to tell the story.
This is especially evident in the demos of Fireworks and now Three Volts. Both stories have a more suspenseful beginning. In "Fireworks", the funeral is on fire, while "Three Volts" is that the two protagonists are separated in time and space. As the characters interact, they continue to push the plot forward, and finally bring out to the player the heavy topic that the author really wants to explain.
In fact, the cinematic narrative structure adopted by Moonlight Cockroach is derived from Japanese horror puzzle games.
In 2012, when Moonlight Cockroach was still in college, it was a time when Japanese folk home-made horror puzzle games were booming, and games such as "Witch's House" and "Mad Father" were loved by many young people, and Moonlight Cockroach was also one of them.
The engine tool used in these Japanese horror puzzle games is RPGMaker. At the beginning of generation zero, this engine was still relatively rudimentary, and the space given to game makers was still very small, so game creators who could not break through in gameplay were bound to work the narrative structure.
For example, in "House of the Witch", in the process of advancing the game, there are various foreshadowing buried in places that are difficult for the player to detect. These foreshadowings make players doubt their own characters, and after a lot of details, the story is wrapped up at the end of the game, giving players a stronger sense of shock.
The art style that fits the temperament of the story is an important factor in the large number of fans of "Fireworks" and "Three Volts". The overall art style of "Fireworks" is relatively gray, and the special size ratio makes the picture narrow and long, which is more in line with the picture style of old-fashioned Hong Kong horror films. At the same time, the painting style of watercolor further highlights the sad tone of the game and enhances the player's sense of substitution.
In terms of art style, "Three Volts" chose a different way of presenting itself from "Fireworks", that is, highlighting local elements. Pagers, fortune tellers and Tianfu Coke, as long as you have experienced the nineties, you can experience the intimacy that these elements bring to players. When the player experiences this intimacy, it is natural to further enter the story.
Interactive design is also an important means for Fireworks and Three Volts to enhance player immersion.
"Every frame of the film, every description of the novel, all the audience and the reader see the same content. While everyone's understanding may be different, the amount of information received is equal. The game is completely different. Take the demo of "Three Volts" as an example, some players have completed the level in 40 minutes, and some players have seen every interaction point, so the two people have different understandings of the story," moonlight cockroach said.
A similar detail exists in the demo of Three Volts. When Manager Li, Wang Zong and Secretary Su talk to Father Yang, who appears on the screen of the video hall in the air, the game gives players the opportunity to investigate the three people alone, and will bring out their views on these three people through the dialogue between the two protagonists, so as to explain the background of Manager Li, Wang Zong and Secretary Su.
Interactive objects are also an important way to enhance immersion. Moonlight Cockroach mentioned that there was feedback from players when "Fireworks" that there were some few interactive elements in the game, including almost all the items available to players were used to solve puzzles, and there were no props that were not related to the main line. So the whole game is played, and the player's experience is more like watching a movie that can solve the puzzle, rather than a game.
As a result, Moonlight Cockroach has made great upgrades and improvements in "Three Volts" in response to this. For example, in the demo of "Three Volts", the poster on the wall has become an interactive element, and the Easter egg of "Overlord Farewell" has also surprised players. The increase in this interactive item can not only enhance the player's sense of substitution, but also throw more background information to the player.
The "horror fever" of China's indie games continues. The reason why this fire can still be burned vigorously is because of people's desire for good stories, especially stories close to social reality. While carrying many good stories, horror games can amplify people's fears about some real problems and pass them on to more audiences. I believe that in the future, more excellent horror games can appear in our game market.