PC, Xbox; Whitethorn Games
This brief, raw and unsettling reimagining of a celebrated environmentalist’s campaign against pesticides presents a sickly vision of nature contaminated by humans
Video games are often getaways to ravishing natural worlds. The Forest Cathedral transports you to one whose beauty is a little too intense, mixing the showroom gloss of stock graphics with the awful vividness of Sylvia Plath’s hospital tulips. It’s a first-person puzzle game based on the work of Rachel Carson, whose 1962 book Silent Spring documented the impact of chemical pest control on ecosystems, including the widely banned insecticide DDT. The game offers a compressed, spacey abstraction of Carson’s life, including her romance with Dorothy Freeman, clashes with the chemical industry and her death from cancer soon after Silent Spring’s publication.
Carson appears in the game as a fresh-faced researcher, monitoring the animals on a small island. Over a couple of hours you explore using an augmented-reality lens, which reveals glowing contaminants in organisms and the cables snaking beneath the soil and trees. These cables lead to trunk-mounted terminals, where you play a punishing Metroid-style platformer, its spiky dungeons roamed by two-dimensional cousins of the bugs and fish in Carson’s charge. Completing levels of this game-within-the-game activates machines in the 3D world, but there are eerier outcomes, too: sometimes, things occur in the background in your peripheral vision while you’re concentrating on a terminal. Continue reading...
http://dlvr.it/SlbK2V
