One morning, Franz Kafka woke up from an uneasy sleep and found himself turned into an indie game on Steam.
"What happened to me?" He thought. It's not a dream. After his death in June 1924, the Austrian writer Kafka gained a reputation he never had before, and his life and works were adapted into novels, plays, movies, and radio dramas, resulting in the proper noun "Kafka-style", and novels such as Metamorphosis, Castle, and Judgment influenced writers around the world - compared to the namelessness of his lifetime, this is really a Kafka-like magical experience, much more interesting than becoming a beetle.
This time, in this adventure puzzle game, K is no longer an arrested bank assistant or a land surveyor who wants to enter the castle. K gets a job that forces him to leave home and embark on a journey, and the world outside of his hometown is not as normal as he thinks: barrel knights, beetle people, divers, invisible people...
This isn't the first time Kafka has become a game. Released in 2015, Resident Evil: Revelations 2 is a figurative representation of Kafka's life, with four chapters of scenes, plots and monsters, corresponding to Kafka's "In Exile", "Observation", "Judgment" and "Metamorphosis", and the loading interface in the game has a large number of Kafka quotes, as well as "Kafka Pictures" that can be collected.
The Kafka Video Game on steam was announced in 2013 and was not officially released until four years later. Developer Denis Galanin (more commonly known as mif2000) is a Russian who claims to live in a hill near Yekaterinburg. His last title, Hamlet or the last game without mmorpg features, shaders and product placement, included elements of combat and puzzle solving, and won some indie awards since its launch in 2010, but player reviews were mixed.
Kafka Video Game continues the developer's unique art style, denis galanin noted on the steam page: "No inventory, no boss battles, no RPG elements... Only absurd and surreal. The game will be officially released on Steam on April 6.
Ninety-three years ago, in April, 41-year-old Franz Kafka, accompanied by his lover Diamante, went to a sanatorium in Klosterneuburg, Austria, where he spent the last two months of his life. The contradictions of external elegance and inner loneliness, desire and guilt for sexual desire, admiration and hatred for his father, these contradictions throughout his life, reflected in his words, and finally ended with the eating disorder caused by tuberculosis in the throat.
I hope that in this little game, after a long and wonderful journey, he can have a happy ending.