The Archivist and the Revolution- By Autumn Chen
This was the first game I played in the competition that felt like the work of a highly accomplished practitioner. When I read that it had been created by means of the same platform that I had used to assemble my own, maddeningly jank, offering I felt very quiet inside. Several games later I am yet to find another entry which has achieved comparable ambition with equivalent polish.
The Archivist and the Revolution presents a dystopian future where the world has been scorched and a remnant fraction of humanity struggles on in a colossal bunker-city where, as it’s perfect tag-line explains, “The world is ending and you are still paying rent”.
The basic gameplay revolves around this contradiction, making ends meet in a world where life is increasingly impossible and all the forces of the state are organised to oppose your very existence. I don’t want to give too much away, because the game’s greatest achievement is the way that it’s rich lore is integrated into gameplay in a way that reveals itself organically and under the agency of the player, but it is this sense of living in a world that objects to you on the most fundamental level which is the core conceit.
Like all the best speculative fiction I found the allegory at once unsettlingly relatable, as it could be for any subject of late era capitalism, but also profoundly illuminating about existences beyond my own. I insist that you play it.