2023-06-04 09:09:00
When Zelda occupies all the thoughts of players absorbed in an orienteering race that projects them to the four cardinal points of a world visited from top to bottom, a proposal arises that resembles its antithesis: Decarnation. In terms of size, of course, since a game with global ambitions is opposed here to a first alternative creation, from the French studio Atelier QDB, but above all in terms of manufacture and shape. When Nintendo’s creation is in expansion, outward projection, Decarnation composes a concave game, where everything flows inwards, towards interiority.
This center of all gravity towards which the player is perpetually reminded is both a place and a person. It’s Gloria, a cabaret dancer who feels her early youth escaping her as she approaches her thirties. Her career is at a turning point, her couple too, when she would like to continue in a straight line. But a miraculous proposition arises: a patron who offers her everything she dreams of. Appointment is made. She wakes up locked in a cellar. In a windowless room, with a swan-shaped bed, a small wardrobe, a bathtub and a steel prison door. We touch the other neuralgic point of Decarnation.
Psychosis paddling pool
This confinement, extremely rare in video games in that it prevents any form of escapism often associated with the media, Decarnation installs it admirably by working the frame. While it’s not surprising for a pixel-art game to sport a large black border around its image to better do justice to illustrations that benefit from not being seen too closely, the cropping effect participates here in the combined crushing of the player and Gloria as the duration of her captivity stretches out. Locked in the dreams of another (the room recreated like a doll’s house), the young woman broods, collapses on herself. His spirit, put under glass, begins a slow process of self-devouring. The game then takes us from one nightmare to another, Gloria revisiting places that are familiar to her but transformed into a space of predation, treacherous and fleeing lands where the sum of the small and large attacks of which she has been the victim is replayed. Her apartment becomes a maze, the club becomes a place of perdition, when it’s not the 11th arrondissement that changes into a lake city invaded by bubbles of flesh or jaws ready to close in on her. The psychosis paddling pool of his psyche changes into an Olympic swimming pool.
Japanese influence
Scenes from male gaze moist crossings full frame, this time, the change of scale helping to multiply the effect felt in front of these paintings where Toporian hints mingle with an aesthetic nourished by Japanese terror. The contribution to the (formidable) soundtrack by Akira Yamaoka, emblematic composer of the games Silent Hillis no stranger to this impression, but the most obvious Japanese influence is probably that of filmmaker Satoshi Kon, as the game is haunted by the specter of Perfect Blue and its singer locked in the fetish eye of a fan-aggressor.
The game pushes the vice so far as to ensure that its gameplay marries the emotional state of Gloria (beautiful sequence of ambulatory puzzle where one must stall his movements on the stanzas of a poem). Unbreathable, Decarnation does not give more respite to his captive than to the player, always encouraged to decode the underlying language of the symbolism of the paintings he crosses, of a creation that organizes its own self-criticism for the time of a museum scene where his influences jostle (David Lynch, Hans Bellmer, Takato Yamamoto, Fragonard…). To better underline that this woman constantly spied on by a camera is not only watched but also shown, staged, by men.
Decarnation from Atelier QDB, on PC and Switch.
#Decarnation #life #psychoses #Liberation