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Two years ago, the most popular and non-domestic suspense crime drama on the whole network, "The Hidden Corner", was going to be changed into a game.
Domestic dramas, especially suspense dramas, to be changed into games, these keywords combined together, it is difficult to imagine what kind of thing will be born.
When it comes to games adapted by domestic IP cross-media, the various examples we can think of in recent years are basically haunted by foul-smelling negative news. Negative labels such as kryptonite, consumer feelings, and destruction of the original work, through the crotch of several works, have indelibly become the "public impression" of domestic cross-media adaptation of games.
And this game adapted from the name of "The Hidden Corner", at first glance, seems to be easy to make the first impression of the first smell of the masses "rubbing heat". What kind of game is this?
iQIYI's web drama "The Hidden Corner" is adapted from Zijin Chen's 2013 speculative novel "Bad Kids". It tells the story of three little farts who accidentally recorded the scene of the murder and used it to "fight wits and courage" with the murderer.
As the second episode under the highly acclaimed "Mist Theater" column, "The Hidden Corner" lived up to expectations and detonated the popularity of the whole network once it was broadcast.
With the hard texture of "American dramas", the dark plot that challenges public order and good customs and the bottom line of censorship, the rare and sensitive themes involving juvenile ethical crimes, the acting skills of powerful actors who stand out in a group of small fresh meats, and the rather "knowledgeable" suspense manufacturing method of the new director of the band with maverick aesthetics, it has successfully won overwhelming praise, won more than ten "best drama" awards at home and abroad, and once again broke the prejudice of many viewers on the story carrier of "domestic network drama".
And the evidence that best reflects the circle of "The Hidden Corner" is that a famous line in the play has become the spiritual slogan of the blood-washed network horns of that year.
(Murder Trailer – "Do you see I Still Have a Chance")
This line symbolizes the beginning of this twisted, crazy, and desperate story, and also hints at the situation in which all the characters struggling for their lives in the play are in a state of fire and magic. In the mouths of netizens, this sentence has evolved into a "death threat" that is more powerful than any foul language.
Apparently, the game production team of "The Hidden Corner" also understood the weight of this line and put it on the official PV cover of its debut.
However, if you have watched the TV series and learned about some well-known horror games, you should feel quite a bit about this PV... incredible.
This PV almost completely adapted "The Hidden Corner", which should be a realistic suspense style, into a horror game.
More than 90% of the game scenes that appear in the PV are scenes that seem to appear only in horror games. For example, extremely dark and oppressive confined spaces, harsh and haunted eerie background sounds, and a variety of rather physiologically uncomfortable flash shattered picture effects.
Even the standing paintings of the characters are portrayed in the direction of "if you want more hades, you will have more hades".
Obviously, the characters in the game are based on the actors in the original TV series, and the standing paintings of Zhang Dongsheng, Zhu Chaoyang and Zhou Chunhong all maintain the portrait characteristics of Qin Hao, Rong Zishan and Liu Lin.
However, compared with the TV series, Zhang Dongsheng and Zhou Chunhong's standing paintings are completely "bloodless", and their expressions are extremely vicious and frightening, tragic and white like zombies, full of annoying anger. In short, for the sake of the atmosphere of Hades, people are painted like people.
(In the photo, the mother and child's expression is abruptly distorted, with the sound effect of the underworld, I almost peed out)
In this scene, perhaps to highlight the distorted "mother-child relationship" between Zhu Chaoyang and Zhou Chunhong, PV arranges a scene in which the person in the photo poses a strange expression far beyond the scope of human understanding, and the degree of scariness of the underworld has far exceeded the horror performance of most horror games.
Yes, with these PV contents above, it seems that we can draw a conclusion:
If the "Hidden Corner" TV series emphasizes the "suspense" of the original film through environmental changes such as cold and warm tones and lights, then this adapted game is to use an almost violent, depiction of "ghost film" like rendering to highlight the "hades" sense of the story atmosphere.
(Face reflection of the game console screen)
(Sink of blood dripping; except hades is also hades)
These extreme "hades" feelings are never attempted to be shown by TV dramas. The original drama tells the story and does not go in this direction.
The game seems to intend to show the more restrained and restrained character emotions in the play with the "exaggerated" visual performance style that can best make people feel the shock of the senses. Whether it is about Zhang Dongsheng's crime or the distortion of the mother-child relationship, the game has chosen the expression of "it will make people afraid" to highlight, that is, to shape a suspense story in the direction of a horror story.
After talking about the picture, let's talk about the gameplay. Unfortunately, the game has not yet officially announced the specific gameplay, but from the PV, we can roughly guess two possibilities.
First, the core gameplay may be mouse click interactions similar to The Mystery of Seberia or Escape from the Room. The PV shows a game flow that is crammed into a large number of mini-game puzzle designs, and there are a large number of object close-ups that seem to require players to check every corner by themselves. Therefore, the entire game may be a combination of this "point where to go" pointer interaction puzzle and the AVG part of the standing station pile dialogue.
(Zhu Chaoyang stole the watch)
(Some of the graphics that reflect the puzzle gameplay)
The second possibility is the horizontal scene framework that frequently appears in the PV, and it is difficult not to think of a more popular horizontal puzzle horror game design paradigm such as "Fireworks", "Detention", "Coma" and so on. However, this framework is bound to be accompanied by richer and larger scenes to explore interactive gameplay.
For now, the story of "The Hidden Corner" does not seem to provide enough "exploration resources" to support this gameplay, and it is only possible to give some small scenes for exploration in the key plot.
(Suspected horizontal version of the standard link of the solution - chase war)
Unlike most domestic IP games on the market, "The Hidden Corner" is not a mobile game, it is a console-oriented independent game, and the producer Alaba defines its genre as a "story puzzle independent game".
With a mature original script (or a suspense script that loses most of its fun once spoiled) and another story medium that has achieved the ultimate in narrative completion and viewing, how to adapt this story into a (non-text) game so that viewers who have watched the TV series and new players who have not touched the IP can experience the fun? More notably, there is the problem of low audience overlap between TV series and games.
For domestic indie games, this seems to be the first time.
In order to achieve this goal, the production team seems to have two general directions.
The first is to create a differentiated plot experience, that is, a "new plot" that is different from the original.
For example, we can see this scene in the PV:
Zhang Dongsheng in the game seems to have been arrested by the police, and such a plot does not exist in the original TV series.
In this regard, the explanation of the production team is: "On the basis of retaining part of the original part of the setting, a new story interpretation is carried out, focusing on portraying the inner world of the characters." That is to say, the plot of the game is likely to have many differences from the TV series, and there may even be multiple endings and multiple routes. Whether it's the "completion" of the original game or the pit of new players, these new content have a corresponding appeal.
But this also comes with a huge risk: the fate of the pearl jade in the front of the magic change, the player has experienced too much.
(Off-topic, there are still many people who argue because of the differences in the game and the related plots of the spirits in the play)
The other direction is to borrow the art style of "Hades" to create a horror atmosphere that is very different from the original.
As mentioned above, the game chose to use the most exaggerated art style to amplify the visual performance of various "distorted" emotions in the original play, leaning the game into the category of horror games, and "physically" creating a completely different experience from the original. At the same time, borrowing "horror", a keyword that is more prominent in today's domestic game market, can also get more attention.
How these adaptations behave specifically, you have to wait for a demo.
The fact that a domestic boutique story can be adapted into a game is a great joy that every Chinese gamer is happy to see. In the PV, we also saw the production team's tribute and respect for a large number of elements in the original work, such as the crashed ship model, such as the small white boat that symbolizes the requiem... Their love and understanding of "The Hidden Corner" must be beyond our imagination.
However, the particularity of "The Hidden Corner" is doomed to experience many twists, bumps and bumps that far exceed other IPs. I think it must still have a chance.