It’s a game that can be fully experienced in a few hours, though how much they want to delve into each of the nodes linking each character and scene is also left up to the player. “It would have been literally easier to just sit and write a novel – at least they go in a straight line,” Hett laughs, before clarifying that the word count includes all the scenes in the game, including multiple paths, as well as dozens of “extras”, which provide one-off perspectives from minor characters. Which begs the question: why not just write a book then? These characters literally surround this incident at the start of the game, as the player follows one perspective and then another, each time opening up a node that leads to a new path like a branching, intertwining web that takes them back in time and into the future.Īs a piece of interactive fiction – a niche genre better known for personal and experimental work, including Hett’s own c ya laterrr – Closed Hands is ambitious and complex, with an estimated word count of 130,000 words that rivals a novel. I’ve met hundreds of people that I should never have met and had no reason to meet, other than us being linked by the atrocity.”Ĭlosed Hands explores this idea by “pulling the camera back” to examine the lives of five people: Marcus, a young man caught up in the incident indirectly as a witness Beth, a local journalist pursuing the story Farrah, an intelligence operative who tracks and acts on extremist intelligence Haziq, a Muslim business owner who’s the father of one of the attackers and Mike, a lifelong Hartwich resident who’s gradually been pulled into a far-right group. “When I went through everything, I became one part of this enormous story made up of hundreds of people that were suddenly connected by this single event. “There’s a lot of dialogue around this that’s much bigger than me,” he explains. And as an outspoken anti-fascist campaigner, as well as a co-founder of Survivors Against Terror – whose members include Brendan Cox, widower of the Labour MP Jo Cox, who was murdered by a far-right extremist in 2016 – Hett was already conscious of the wider societal issues that underly any act of extremism – on both ends. Indeed, the 35-year-old from Stockport had already channelled his grief by making a trilogy of experimental games, available for free on itch. In May 2017, his brother Martyn, 29, was a victim of the Manchester Arena bombing that killed 23 people.īut if Closed Hands isn’t about the attack itself, it’s also not about Hett either. From a personal perspective, it’s understandable why Hett has no interest in depicting the attack itself in gratuitous detail. The incident is actually a terrorist attack, which occurs in the fictional UK city of Hartwich. For Dan Hett, director of interactive fiction game Closed Hands, it’s quite deliberate and irrelevant: “All we need to know is that something happened, and there were reasons for it, and there were effects afterwards.” What kind of incident, we’re not told precisely. At the centre of the screen is a text box that simply reads: “Incident”.
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