By Jim Rossignol on April 15th, 2009 at 12:33 pm.
Judith is a short narrative game by Terry Cavanagh and Stephen Lavelle. It’s a strange little story that is somehow all the more creepy for its extreme lo-fi 3D telling. I can’t really add much more to it than that, aside from finding it oddly familiar. First-person and pixellated it is, and yet Wolfenstein it is not.
15/04/2009 at 12:52 Smurfy says:
l0oks gay lol
15/04/2009 at 12:56 Butler` says:
That screenshot is just plain creepy.
15/04/2009 at 12:58 jay says:
Great game (very creepy) but this comments thread is not off to a good start.
15/04/2009 at 13:00 jay says:
Opps, my post would have made more sense if I was the second poster.
@Butler
It gets creepier!
15/04/2009 at 13:11 Mort says:
I liked it, despite having even less definition than wolfstein 3d, it still managed to freak me out some times, especially since the music is perfect. Short samples play at exactly the right time to create tension or suspense.
If nothing else, it´s at least a good example on how some sparse but well chosen music and sounds can create a scary mood almost by themselves (some dialog does the rest). The music isn´t even scary itself, just regular tunes on a piano mostly, probably making it all the creepier when you enter a room and it starts playing and you´re “OMG OMG OMG somethings gonna happen, something BAD” :O
15/04/2009 at 13:15 Gap Gen says:
That’s rather nice.
15/04/2009 at 13:15 Jubaal says:
**CONTAINS SPOILER**
I really enjoyed that, very creepy. Nice interaction between past and present. However the Jeff ending did seem rather lame, I was expecting a little bit more at the end.
15/04/2009 at 14:25 Mort says:
—-(maybe a minor spoiler)—
@Jubaal
Totally, I was expecting a low blow or something myself to cap the overall experience
15/04/2009 at 15:17 Jazmeister says:
I got totally stuck really early on, so I’ll say this:
IT’S A PIXEL HUNTER!!!
There, you may now play it without needing a tea break.
Also, I saw this on increpare’s blog and didn’t really see how it was about control.
One of these days, though, you’ll download a game like this and it’ll be totally procedural. Graaww!!
15/04/2009 at 15:22 sbs says:
Interesting.
15/04/2009 at 15:36 Sinnerman says:
Walk around a bit in a very simple map then press space to trigger the next block of text. That’s an arty narrative game for you.
15/04/2009 at 15:45 Nexus says:
Judith has indeed wonderful atmosphere and rather nice (although a litte repetitive) narration but it’s hardly a game. There’s no challenge at all, no riddles to solve or enemies to defeat – simply go from A to B to C and game over. If nothing else it’s still an interserting experiment in videogame storytelling and it reminds me of Path.
15/04/2009 at 15:52 Helm says:
Interactivity gives the narration an element of complicity on which the theme builds fittingly. It is however in the end more vague than I had hoped. But it’s a space worth exploring in gaming, I think.
15/04/2009 at 16:17 Kieron Gillen says:
Helm: “Complicity” is totally the word.
KG
15/04/2009 at 16:40 Markoff Chaney says:
That was an enjoyable experience. I liked the interplay between the locations in time and parallel storytelling to gain the whole narrative. Another excellent example breaking down the boundaries between simple linear storytelling as told through an interactive medium as opposed to a static one. Another fine iteration of a good idea whose time is here.
15/04/2009 at 17:08 roBurky says:
The complete lack of choice in anything was disappointing. Made worse by the way it even takes movement control away from you for a lot of the game.
Is that it means about being a game about control? That you don’t have any?
15/04/2009 at 18:07 Jubaal says:
**Spoiler Alert**
I don’t think the reference to “control” is about the gameplay itself, but more about the subtext of the plot i.e. Judith’s husband keeping control over his former wives and their lovers. That is the way I see it anyway.
15/04/2009 at 18:28 Xhumar says:
Indeed, that was very creepy. I thoroughly enjoyed the 20 minutes of solid storytelling
15/04/2009 at 18:52 Gap Gen says:
Jazmeister: Yeah, but the pixels are about 5 feet wide.
15/04/2009 at 19:20 l1ddl3monkey says:
Whats with that opening comment? Did Smurfy get lost on the way to Youtube?
That was a weird and unnerving experience so consequently I enjoyed it quite a bit. I’m off to shove some more bees down my trousers and then go for a walk in a pollen rich field.
15/04/2009 at 20:16 Dave Gates says:
What an odd ending… interesting though. Look forward to more work from them.
15/04/2009 at 20:30 Richard J says:
Interesting, the first computer game I’ve ever seen to be fairly explicitly modelled (right down to the music) on a Bartok opera.
15/04/2009 at 22:50 noexes says:
Whats with that opening comment? Did Smurfy get lost on the way to Youtube?
I think we are being trolled people :p
15/04/2009 at 23:34 Jetsetlemming says:
How weird of an ending. I think I maybe know what was going on, but not really. Not really at all. Was there some hints as to why the husband was locking people in his dungeon, had a pile of bloody gold, had a blood soaked armor, had a hidden secret garden, had an underground forest of dead trees that has storms apparently, has an underground pool, and has an dark hidden room full of his past loves? It feels like there’s another two minutes or so of Judith that is missing from the end, probably involving a jump scare of the guy main character seeing the husband, possibly in ghost-form.
15/04/2009 at 23:39 Richard J says:
Making my slightly cryptic reference slightly more explicit, the Judith section of the game’s plot is based on Bartok’s (amazing) opera, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle. The rooms encountered pretty much play out in the same order as in the libretto.
(There was an amazing concert performance at the Barbican earlier this year.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluebeard%27s_Castle
16/04/2009 at 00:21 Chris says:
Wow… how does a game that is so low-res it can’t POSSIBLY contain any scary pics stil manage to make me scared to turn the corner??
16/04/2009 at 14:47 Moonracer says:
I nice experience. While playing it I couldn’t help but feel that it did a better job of being dark and moody in some ways than The Path did (though I still like that experience too).
16/04/2009 at 21:49 Hajimete no Paso Kon says:
Is there an alternative ending or something?
17/04/2009 at 01:27 Meib says:
@Moonracer: This game definitely did a better job at being dark and moody than The Path did. I was never scared while playing The Path event though it’s supposed to be horror game, while I was sure afraid of going into all the rooms and finding out what was inside them while playing Judith.
17/04/2009 at 06:21 SofS says:
*** Spoilers begin ***
I laughed out loud at the bit where you’re given the ability to choose and only one thing to select.
I enjoyed this a fair bit. Specifically, I liked the reversal of expectation in the storylines. At first, the storyline in the past seems like the mystery to solve. By the time you get back to the present and open up the passage, though, you’ve already been really heavily clued in that the past is going to be based on the Bluebeard tale type. For me, this meant that the present was brought to the forefront as the real mystery; the past is over and done with, but who knows what’s happened to Emily until she’s found? Using tragedy as a way to add tension to a mystery is pretty cool in my books.
I would like to know whether or not Emily’s necklace is actually the same necklace as the one in the past, though. Also, are Judith’s dreams commentary on her story alone or on both of them? I read the ending as being essentially a happy one, with Emily and Jeff rejecting the deceit that destroyed Judith, but I’m not sure how much I would bet on it (without hearing some odds).
Formalism is fun.
*** Spoilers end ***