A mind-twister. Memories and visuals can be scary, something one is reminded of after playing ‘In the Pause between the Ringing’. More than a game, it’s a visual narrative that evokes feelings and, at times, makes the player face what-if dilemmas. Created by Studio Oleomingus, an independent game and arts studio in Chala, Gujarat, the project was a commission for the Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt exhibition at V&A, London, last year.
The plot captures an imagined history of telephone mining. It is “a rumination about completion, about territorial margins and about the haunting of bodies and memories that are translated across borders”. As important as the visuals are the interactive texts that are very well written and keeps the gamer fixated for a long time.
Once the receiver is off the cradle of an old-fashioned telephone, the gamer comes across some riveting messages, like “Namaskar Sahib…. I want to speak to a ghost.” Soon the person on the other end of the phone says, “I am a weaver of circumstance and the giver of meaning. I am a connoisseur of memory. I am the last author and the first historian of time. I am a sutradhar, a narrator. So tell me is there a ghost that I can speak to.”
It’s then the player steps on a quagmire of mystery that twists and turns through a visual delight while the eeriest of background tracks doesn’t let the pace slacken. One phone to another phone. One visual delight to another.
Studio Oleomingus is founded by Dhruv Jani who runs it in collaboration with Sushant Chakraborty and Vivek Savsaiya while their frequent collaborators include Salil Bhayani and Suparna Chakraborty. The idea is to place video games in a visual universe that’s not far removed. While playing on a PC, the inputs are kept simple —WASD keys to move, pointing the mouse to look and ‘E’ to interact. That simple.
The other games from the developers are equally interesting — in ‘The Indifferent Wonder of an Edible Place’, the player becomes “a municipal building eater, consuming a tower at the edge of an unnamed town”, ‘A Museum of Dubious Splendors’ is a “a storybook from the world of Somewhere” while ‘Under a Porcelain Sun’ attempts to record “the stories of ghosts who loiter between public histories and private memory”.
Studio Oleomingus is perhaps more a visual creative force than a video game company. However you look at them, it’s a team on a mission.