Indoor Kids Vol. 3: Games Galore
This week’s newsletter, in column form
The following accompanies this week’s Indoor Kids newsletter. You can find all the current listings at the Now Playing: Immersive For Indoor Kids page.
Hello There,
This is all so strange, right?
I mean, on top of the horrible it’s just strange. As someone whose life revolved around work from home for the past half decade some of what I personally do hasn’t changed up all that much. Yet the keystone part of any week — venturing out to explore some new production or experience — is gone.
I haven’t fully adjusted yet. Mostly because I don’t want to. I don’t want to tame that feeling.
Yet I know there are other ways to channel that impulse, and that’s one of things we’re aiming for as we gather up these “Indoor Kids” editions.
Not everything that we’re getting in Ye Olde Inbox is something we’d traditionally cover or that fits in the Newswire boxes, but there are good efforts coming out of the broader community that deserve some spotlight time, and today I want to share some of that with you right here.
Beat The Virus: Fauci’s Revenge
We don’t normally cover browser games, but then again they aren’t usually made by escape room owners who recently donated all their prop PPE to NYC hospitals. That would be the good, and even though I haven’t met them personally I think it’s safe to say they’re pretty damn good, people over at Beat The Bomb in NYC.
Fauci’s Revenge is built on Unity an using itch.io to distribute, so it’s playable on desk- and laptops only at the moment, but they’re working on a mobile version. They’ve got a fundraiser going on, a pretty sweet limited edition t-shirt whose proceeds sho to charity, and anyone who beats all 19 levels of the game wins a ticket to Beat The Bomb.
This is a prime example of that can-do spirit we so desperately need and need to see these days. Good on ya, Jesse Bull and the whole Beat The Bomb team.
From our friends over at Tender Claws
The Under Presents is expanding the run of live actors “through the end of May (was previously through the end of March), with chance encounters happening from 8am to 10pm Pacific time. There will also be scheduled variety shows (to be announced on the Tender Claws website and social channels). All of the actors are comfortably working from home thanks to the nature of VR.”
There’s also a new behind the scenes video from the team that features actors in the ensemble.
The Under will pop up on Steam on April 16th, so if you’re one of those people who refuses to buy game software through anything but Steam, well, there you go.
Gone Home: Free Until April 9th
This was flagged by Ricky Brigante over at Everything Immersive group. The seminal narrative immersive sim which has inspired immersive theatre makers and basically launched a subgenre is free on the Epic Game Store for the first part of this month. If you’ve ever explored a space in order to piece together the story of the people who used to live there, well, you might just be able to trace the lineage of that experience through this game. It certainly shaped my understanding of how immersive storytelling can work, and you can see it at play in experiences like The Nest here in LA.
No Time To Decide
This unofficial James Bond themed interactive plays a little fast and loose with IP rules to deliver a quick paced Choose Your Own Adventure that’s playable on desktop or mobile. There’s a lot going on under the hood here. Give it a few whirls before the lawyers make it disappear. (Shout out to Will Cherry for sharing this with me. Let’s hope no one gets in too much trouble, eh?)
Resources, Relief Efforts, and More
LEIA’s GoFundMe for LA immersive artists Creative Capital has developed a list of arts resources, including workshops and grants. NYC EVENT PRO has put a call out for venues that the State of New York can temporarily lease for COVID-19 patients. Facebook has a Small Business Grant Program. More gets added into the E.I. Mutual Aid thread every couple of days. Keep track of it there. (We’ll be moving some of that over to a dedicated NoPro page over the weekend/next week.)
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