Elsinore uses the relationship between its mechanics and setting to contend with its status of a Shaekspearian adaptation and to communicate nuances of character and theme. Through the injection of diegetic time-looping into the original play the game can properly homage the original telling and create a space for play. By casting Ophelia as the star through each loop, Elsinore can rationalize the top-down view of the world and events necessary to the easy engagement of the game-world’s puzzles and the rumor sharing mechanics that drive them. The diegetic time-looping mechanics also connect the normal everyday status of the player to Ophelia, allowing us to connect with her instead of engaging the world through a heroic protagonist who canonically may not fail.
In his survey of Shakespeare videogame adaptations, “‘The Time Is out of Joint’: Interactivity and Player Agency in Videogame Adaptations of Hamlet”, Julian Novitz frames the tension that these games often have with their source material through the lens of hauntology. Interaction of some kind is fundamental to games as a medium, but how do you bring this to a Shakespearian play when he quotes Simon Peacock, [speaking within the context of Hamlet: The Video Game (The Stage Show)], “the worst show Shakespeare wrote to turn into a videogame because it’s four hours of dialogue and five minutes of action.” According to Novitze, Elsinore deals with the tension with the “spectral” source of Hamlet by separating itself from the original play’s events and enabling the player to construct their own formulation of the play. Through enabling this act of construction, Elsinore engages with and shapes our understanding of Hamlet’s past as much as the past informs it.
Through what means does the player “construct their own individualized version of a Hamlet narrative.” In Elsinore Ophelia has little direct power over others and must conduct the play via the sowing of knowledge and passions. Ophelia, and the player, do this by developing an inventory of hearsay that the rest of the cast may respond to. This inventory develops across time-loops and is completely open in its use, (with the exception of notifying characters of truths collected from other timelines which have yet to become true this time around). It is through mastering the deployment of hearsay that the player masters the game.
According to the Elsinore Developer Blog, this system was developed to address problems which arose within an earlier draft, where Ophelia could make direct choices while directly being involved in scenes. In that version, every new piece of information judged by the writers and its relevance determined for all possible scenes, “no matter how much we broadcasted where these new options would be, accounting for all the different ways a player might want to use their knowledge proved to be a herculean task.” By limiting the use of knowledge to out of scene engagements and running scenes deterministically based on character states, this change reduced the cost of creating more branches within the story and made outcomes easier to predict.
According to the developers, the hearsay system serves the game’s themes as well, “this new system wound up working better for us thematically. In the original play, Ophelia was not an active participant in the events – in fact, she was marginalized or sheltered by most of the important figures in the castle.” As a player being restricted to this means of control can be frustrating when events can’t be predicted or a miscalculation ruins a run, but even that pain is not the player’s alone. The diegetic nature of the time-loops makes that frustration Ophelia’s frustration too.
In the afterword of the novel Edge of Tomorrow, originally published as All You Need is Kill, Hiroshi Sakurazuka reveals that his inspiration for the time-looping sci-fi thriller was in-fact his childhood memories of playing video games, resetting over and over until he wins. While the hero of the game would be congratulated on their triumph he would think along the lines of, “Well the joke is on you, gramps. . .I’m just an ordinary guy, and proud of it. I’m here because I put in the time. . . I reset the game hundreds of times. . . Victory was inevitable. So please, hold off on all the hero talk.” The player becomes the main character when they play a game, the protagonist is often just an avatar or thematic puppet. The player can when because they have control of the loop. Even when playing games which don’t create full reset conditions, we still create smaller loops in the form of save-resets or working from check-points.
By moving the loops into the space of the narrative of the game itself, Elsinore integrates the unreal state of narrative stake brought about by the time-loop structure. Ophelia’s perceptions of the world and the player’s perceptions of the world are thus aligned. As the player masters the game, like Sakurazuka at his console, so does Ophelia master the social terrain of the space she inhabits. And like for“ordinary guy” Sakurazuka, for both the “ordinary” player and Ophelia, “ordinary” in the sense that she has nor power over the royalty around her, “Victory [is] inevitable.”. . . Or is it?
Unlike the narrative, time-loop, flash game no-one has to die, (in which, like Elsinore, each loop supplies information that allows for better future runs), someone has to die. Elsinore’s final puzzle is a wicked one. Knowledge of the world can help you save a number of cast and avert the Shakespearian catastrophe of the original play. At least one tragedy will unfold, however, and Ophelia will have to choose. (In fact, it is the search for a perfect ending that unlocks the most destructive.) This lack of a “true” or perfect ending centers the themes of choice and responsibility. Ophelia must choose an ending and take responsibility for the world or suffer the Sartean hellscape of Elsinore as-stage, trapped with no exit; meta-narratively the player recusing themselves from the game.
This theme of responsibility is emphasized by the scenes which precede each ending. where Ophelia is staged before the cast and must bear witness to their perspective on her decision before confirming the ending. Here, Ophelia is asked to face an ultimate judgement by her peers and must face the voices of even those she left dead. From asking from chances for redemption or judging Ophelia for her manipulation, they question her motives and their costs. In the “Sacrifice Reality for Joy” ending there is no criticism and these spectres are revealed by King Hamlet’s Ghost to the product of self-delusion. This serves as the rule-proving exception; the casts in the other sequences should be interpreted as salient representations of the characters.
In Bhudist metaphysics, clinging to material aspects of the world, including other people, is one of the traps that keep us one the wheel of life, death, and suffering. We can see these themes play out within the anime Puella Magi Madoka Magica. In this show the character Homura loops time over and over again in order to save her love Madoka. Each subsequent attempt carries the karmic weight of all before. As each ends in disaster, the karma compounds. Only through letting go of her attachment to Madoka can Homura allow the world to be saved.
Elsinore does allow its player, and by extension Ophelia, to reverse time and return and pick a new ending, even after confirming it. Such a transgression comes at a cost. If Ophelia does return, the ending is burned out of The Hand of Dionysus, the book through which the narrative is concluded. From an existentialist perspective this mechanic serves as punishment for acting in bad faith, to deny one’s past choices and to deny reality. This denial of the state in a desire or need to seem more. Like Homura’s return to save her love, Ophelia is accruing karma. Karma that is represented through the burning of the burning of possible futures.If Ophelia chooses to return to Elsinore again and again, the painful, ultimate ending of Exeunt All will be the only left to them. In the act of not choosing to claim a fate she chooses an eternal purgatory of denying her manipulator’s satisfaction and agency. The choice of imposing hell upon another even as it brings upon herself eternal self-destruction. The only way to escape dedication to a future is to forever burn the present. From this ending there is no return.
Unless of course the player chooses to delete their game data. Then then can bring the existential curse to a brand new Ophelia.
Fallon, Connor. “Dev Diary #2, ‘Interacting with the World of Elsinore’ .” Elsinore Developer Blog, 3 Nov. 2014, https://goldenglitch.tumblr.com/post/101619861076/dev-diary-2-interacting-with-the-world-of-elsinore.
no-one has to die. 2013. Web. https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/615863
Novitz, Julian. “‘The Time Is Out of Joint’: Interactivity and Player Agency in Videogame Adaptations of Hamlet.” Arts 9.4 (2020): 122. Crossref. Web. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/arts9040122.
Sakurazaka, Hiroshi. Edge of Tomorrow. Translated by Joseph Reeder, Haikasoru, 2014.
The test of this post was written in in the Spring of 2021 as part of a course on interactive fiction. It was a grind to find my arguments and construct something that arguable means something. I want to thank Celeste and Jared who I was working with and gave me the emotional support I needed to wrap it up at the end.