Conceptual Theatre: Irrational Vets Making The Black Glove
Time-travelling meddling in artists' lives
Though BioShock is seemingly continuing, essentially everyone who ever worked on the series has split up, split off, or travelled to the four corners of the world. BioShock's one of the finer modern FPS series, sure, but what might its makers do freed from the demands of sprawling development with huge budgets and mandatory face-shooting? We've already seen Gone Home and Eldritch from BioFolks gone indie, and now another group are having a crack.
Several Irrational Games alumni have announced The Black Glove, a first-person game where you'll need to alter people's past lives to change a production in a strange theatre. Ooh, metaphysical!
The Black Glove is set in The Equinox, where you're putting on an event showing a spot of art, a film, and some music. To please the crowd and critics, you'll get to fiddle with the past lives of the artist, film-maker, and musicians to improve their later work. And to see what happens as you mess with time, I guess, as it sounds like it'll give room to make 'mistakes.' Inspired by Binfinite's '1999' difficulty mode, might I suggest a '2014' mode where one faces Internet commenters too. Polygon have the skinny on all this.
The ranks of developers Day for Night Games include Joe Fielder, a writer on BioShock Infinite at its Rapturian DLC Burial at Sea, Binfinite and Burial senior environment artist Chad King, and series character concept artist Robb Waters.
All we have to go on for now is ideas, albeit some splendid ones, and a few pieces of concept art. I have no idea what "the maze of the space minotaur" is. We should see and hear more of The Black Glove when Day for Night launch a Kickstarter campaign next month (yes, yes, simmer down).
It seems that after making a BioShock game, some folks are keen to continue exploring the genre and its ideas, taking them to new places--under their own direction. Both Gone Home and Eldritch were certainly immersive sim-y. With The Black Glove's philosophical slant and especially its interest in the act of creation, if you added guns, why, you might almost have yourself a BioShock!