The Curfew

The Curfew is terrific science fiction, pretty good cinema, a nicely designed defense of individual liberty, and an okay graphic adventure. It also won the Learning & Education award at the 2011 Games for Change Festival.

Designed by Kieron Gillen and funded by Britain's Channel 4, The Curfew takes place in 2027 in a UK dominated by "the Shepherd Party," which plays on fears of terrorism to impose near-absolute control over its citizens. They do so through gamification; you earn "citizen points" for obedience, and lose them through disobedience. Earn enough, and you can be a "Class A" citizen; its not clear what this gets you, other than jumping the queue at fast food joints.

In the initial cut scene, you are given a small cylinder that, you are told, contains data that can overthrow the Shepherd Party. Since it is past curfew, you go to a "safehouse," where there are four other characters, also seeking shelter and out after curfew. It is inevitable that you will be captured, and you must decide which of the four to trust with the data.

Each of the four has a "story to tell;" a set of scenes that lead up to their presence in the safehouse tonight. Each scene is a sort of graphic adventure; you mouse over things, clicking when the cursor changes, engage in dialog-tree conversations with other characters, and eventually unlock movement to the next scene.

Between scenes, you "converse" with the character whose story is being told; each question you ask may increase, decrease, or have no effect on their trust for you. Making correct decisions is not difficult; being sympathetic works just about every time.

There are no real puzzles; navigating a scene to unlock the next one is just a matter of persistence, but if you care, Kyle Mawer has put together a walkthrough.

Back in the early CD-ROM era, when the ability to do filmed video in a game was novel and the graphic adventure was still a commercially viable genre, there were a slew of mostly horrible games that tried to merge the adventure genre with filmed video. When I say "mostly horrible," imagine interminable, badly acted cut scenes with zero actual interaction, held apart by inventory puzzles in fairly crude graphics, or played out on photographs with a handful of lifeless interactions. Until playing The Curfew, I had come to the conclusion that merging video with the adventure game was an obviously bad idea, proven so by experience.

I have to say, however, that the combination works here, and works quite well. Part of the problem, back in the day, was the need to change what area of the disc was being read when a choice was made, so that there was always a perceptible lag whenever you made any choice that branched the video. Here, the clips are preloaded by the Flash framework, and the transitions are seamless. Also, the use of photography for the graphic adventure interactions themselves, coupled with small looped animations of characters drawn from video, makes the game feel alive even when you are not in the video itself. And finally, the developers have had the good taste and sense not to make the non-interactive sequences too lengthy or sententious.

It helps, of course, that both the acting and writing are first-rate; all of the characters are quite believable, except perhaps for Aisha. In this UK, being Moslem would undoubtedly be even harder than it's depicted for her. And the lesbian-ness of Leah is not wholly credible, either. But on the whole, it's a fine piece of cinema. The depiction of the world is excellent too, sort of Max Headroom meets Paranoia.

As a screed in defense of liberty, the science fictional nature of the universe may work against itself; it's a classic "if this goes on" story, in which the freedoms we've already sacrificed to paranoia about terrorism snowball into something quite horrible. Although one wonders where the European Court of Justice is in all this; but perhaps Gillen's UK has withdrawn from the EU.

As a game, however, it's less than stellar. Simply click around, and you'll get there; even failing in the minigames simply means the story advances eventually. And you can win by trusting any of the characters, so long as you choose one you gained the trust of. The tenseness of the narrative frame, in other words, is belied by the 'casualness' of the gameplay challenge.

The world, and the narrative draw you in, however; you're likely to complete the game simply to see its content.

I'm not sure it's exactly a "game for change;" rather, its a game with ambitions to prevent some sorts of change. But if it is one, it's unquestionably the best I've seen of its type since Peacemaker.