Loop 32 - Elsinore
In Which We Give Shakespeare Some Notes
There is a certain game-iness to the basic timeloop concept that feels somewhat untapped. Groundhog Day is nothing if not Bill Murray reluctantly pursuing a series of side quests until he’s levelled up enough to beat the game’s main quest. Piano? Chainsaw carving? Mini games, naturally. There are so many stats and relationships to build up before you can take on the final boss, and I can’t think of a better way to address them than having infinite time.
Games themselves generally forego this approach to time loop narratives, though. Even when they narratively use loops, it’s typically in the service of a very linear experience. Yes, they may give you a couple different options on how to reach Point B from Point A, but these are less alternate routes and more additional lanes on the same road. It’s a pointed experience, a mile deep and an inch wide. There’s no breadth to the world that the loop can empower you to explore, is what I’m saying.
Elsinore is a game that tries to dig the hole a little wider. You play through the events of Hamlet as Ophelia, stuck in the titular castle and repeating the four days that the play takes place over, trying to figure out how to prevent the famous tragedy. It’s hard to deny that it’s a slam dunk of a concept. Taking an almost universally known and very tragice story and giving the player the power to spin it into a happy ending is instantly engaging. In theory.
I am very mixed on Elsinore, I’ll admit right out of the gate. It really is aspiring to something and at times it glances off of the idealized version of its idea. It’s clearly a labor of love. It’s a kickstarter project (remember kickstarter?) that clearly falls on the side of well-intentioned and ill-advised, rather than in the bucket of borderline scam. But the bootstrap quality also shows in some negative ways. While the UI is actually quite functional, it’s incredibly inelegant. The writing (the new stuff, not what’s already provided by Willy Shakes) is often not great and some times teeters over into embarassing. The visuals are poor. The animations and behavior of the characters is kind of janky1.
But first let me get into how this whole thing works. After living through most of the events of Hamlet you get assassinated instead of (*checks notes*) drowning?2 But then you wake up several days prior to your death to do it all again. As you gain information you can bring any of it up to any character to see what they think of it. Slowly you work through “leads”, which function as sidequests to solve mysteries and minor problems. There is a calendar of events which includes the time, location, and associated characters. It updates itself as you influence events and possibly create new future events and prevent others. You can fast forward time at your leisure, follow people around on autopilot, and automatically navigate to anywhere on the map by clicking on it. You can reset the timeline whenever and go back and look at the timelines of previous loops
As I said, it’s actually an extremely functional set of tools. There is a tremendous amount of complexity to manage and I think the leads structure and these controls go a long way. In terms of variables you’re looking at over a dozen proper characters, locations, and four days worth of time. The issue becomes that the characterization, quests, and writing all make the game feel like little more than literal variables. Play becomes a spreadsheet of time management. Dialogue becomes data. Quests become chores.
As to the writing, it has what a would call a fan fiction quality to it3. Tumblr-y, maybe? Some of it is perfectly fine, but much of it is just too cute by half. Just very neat and unnatural feeling character dynamics and arcs abound. There are weird easter egg qualities to it too, such as Othello being a minor character that you can romance. Many characters and events are given a bunch of backstory4 that adds very little beyond more information to uncover.
It also leans into what I would hesitantly call ‘performatively woke’ territory. Now, I don’t assume insincere intentions here, but some of the stuff being dropped into this play about medieval Denmark sticks out a bit, let’s say. I won’t write an exhaustive list5, but take the issue of Ophelia’s family for example. They’ve been written as half black (Polonius is white) in Elsinore. I’ve no issue with changing the race or sex of characters as a rule. I’m not one of those people, y’know?6
Representation is cool, and there’s no reason to not make the choice to have it in settings that are quasi-historical that, for all intents and purposes, may as well be fantasy for the audience.But here they’ve made the choice to expand on/invent Ophelia and her family’s experience as more marginalized characters at court as directly being tied to their race. It’s not an inherently bad idea, I don’t think, but in a game that is fundamentally about trying to get a sad little rich boy to not make everybody die, it never feels congruent.
These elements of modern sensibilities don’t fit into the tale as written. They feel like tacked on signals from the creators to make it clear that they actually GET IT and they know that some of the behaviors of Shakespeare’s characters are PROBLEMATIC. It all reeks of a mindset of diet social consciousness where vaguely gesturing at some social and cultural issues (that are very safely settled as OKAY in the public consciousness) and saying, ‘yeah, we’re with you’. It’s unfair to compare them, but I can’t help but think of, like, Ritz crackers tweeting about pride month or whatever.
Anyway, all these gripes would be besides the point if the thing just kind of worked better. There’s a lot of stuff to manage but they only way to interact with the world, by and large, is to give information to characters at certain times and in a certain order. Even if you know that a character will take a certain innocuous action that results in a worse outcome, if you don’t have a conversation topic to suggest they not do it you’re doomed to watch it happen again and again7. It’s not dissimilar to how in many more action-y games you will encounter obstacles that could easily be climbed over with your actual human body, but your buff leveled up player character could never surmount them. Once you’ve encountered the most accessible 70%-ish of the game, manipulating things to access the final 30% feels very tedious. You might have the gist of the idea of how to achieve something, but the trial and error of pulling it off is brutal, and may not even pay off.
The story of the game ends up being about Quince, the guy who puts on the play to guilt the king, who turns out to be some sort of mischevious time lord imp. There’s a magic book he wants from somebody else and he’s manipulating you to get it8. Whatever. Eventually you get the book and it makes clear that you can pick any of the endings you’ve achieved, from the very bad to the just pretty bad, and select it from the book to make it the final and true ending. There’s like fourteen or something, and I think I’d only unlocked 4, one of which is literally getting knifed on your first run through. It was at about this time that I decided I would never unlock all of these and I didn’t have a particularly strong desire to put in the time to pull off the one ending I had been going for (prevent all deaths, except for maybe Claudius and/or Hamlet). So instead I selected the one where I just leave to go be gay with a pirate lady.
And the above is the thanks I got. Weird that they say they need me. Like, if you don’t want to die, don’t kill each other. I’m not actually doing anything. Anyway, I’ve probably bashed this enough. For the first half or so of my playtime I was really enjoying digging into its gears and seeeing how it worked. It’s very ambitious and the bones of a great concept are definitely here. It manages a lot of the time loop complexity in a very smart way, and gives a great blueprint to build on.
It got me thinking what else this format could work for. You need a pretty simple story that has a fair amount of complexity hiding under the hood. A short timespan and a pretty limited location. Very good dramatic stakes. I’m sure there’s some additional Shakespeare options, but I’m not the one to crack those. What first jumped to mind for me was Die Hard. So somebody go do that, it sounds sick.
Coming up next time, I get Seasonal Affective Disorder while taking on a… marathon of Hallmark-ish Christmas time loop bullshit!
Although I’ve got a lot of nostalgia for it, it’s not great how often this reminded me of Runescape.
It’s very worth noting that I’m not exactly a Hamlet expert. I have seen it some form a handful of times and I know the broad beats and how it all ends, roughly. But someone who actually knows the thing like the back of their hand might get more of a kick out of all the potential changes.
I realize this is literally fan fiction, but you know what I mean.
Again, I might be unfairly maligning things here since I’m not super smart on Hamlet. I’m sure some of that stuff is directly pulled from or easily extracted from the original text, but there’s enough shit floating around about Ophelia’s mom and Hamlet’s grandma, for example, that I’m sure they’re making a good amount of stuff up.
But here’s a first draft: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are recast as women of color; Lesbian pirates; Hamlet gets a full blown #meToo reckoning at one point; the main guard guy has a subplot about being closeted; etc. etc. There are probably a few I’m forgetting and many more I never uncovered.
Bigots.
The prime example of this being how the guard guy, who makes a big announcement in the yard anytime someone dies in the middle of the story. If you’ve arranged for him to capture the prince who’s milling around town prepping an invasion, that character will always escape during an announcement. Spoilers: It’s very difficult to not have someone die in the middle of this story.
A good amount of the annoying lore/backstory I was complaining about falls into this bucket.