Behind the Hydra's Eyes
A wind turbine project management sim. Explore the tangled web of renewable energy, dispossession, and greenwashing through the lens of a British middle-manager who aspires only to pay rent and have a meaningful job.
This game has been created by Dragos Farcas and Adam James as a submission for IndieCade's Climate Game Jam.
Art and Animation - Adam James
Back-end, code and logic - Dragos Farcas
Writing - Adam James & Dragos Farcas
Controls:
WASD Movement
E to Interact
Space to continue dialogue
Mash buttons to type an email
Press enter to send a typed email
You can also download our:
Artistic Statement, which discusses the game's themes
Development Summary, which discusses our game jam journey
Release Plan, which discusses our post-jam development plans
Known Technical Issues:
Interacting with the kettle during day 5 stops the player character from being controllable (currently requires restarting the game).
Download
Comments
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Brilliant game! Perfectly captures the theme of working in a corporate UK office environment and holds a mirror up to the pangs of guilt we all feel at the dubious morality of what companies do.
Thank you! Really glad you enjoyed it and its themes, and commiserations that you can relate to the British Office Experience™️ lol.
Hey, thanks for developing this! I enjoyed the game and felt that it did a good job of meeting the IndieCade jam's brief about exploring nuanced stories about climate change. I did a write-up for the game below on my site - reach out if there's any inaccuracies:
https://www.demodiskreview.com/behind-the-hydras-eyes/
Wow! Thanks so much for taking the time to play, and for writing such a great review! It's very well written, and captures the themes we wanted to wrestle with so lucidly.
Post-jam we're going to add in the planned parts that we cut out due to time constraints, fleshing out the themes and polishing the mechanics (including having the narrative respond to how you complete tasks and answer prompts). Hopefully this will solve the issue you identified of certain mechanics not yet being fleshed out!
In terms of theme, I'd add that our imagery of the hydra, and focus on seeing it's writhing, multi-headed machinations, comes from reading the work of the Zapatistas of Chiapas, who this year celebrated 30 years of fighting for a better world for their community—specifically their 2015 seminar series "Critical Thought in the Face of the Capitalist Hydra", the discussions and responses of which can be viewed freely online at Radio Zapatista.
Thanks again! It's our first collaboration and the first time either of us has done a jam, so it's a bit mindblowing to see our work in a review!
You are very welcome! I'm glad it hit the mark. Yes - I hope the article was sufficiently clear it was a jam game and undergoing future changes! The inspiration for the game and bibliography is quite literate and food for thought. I've engaged in climate science but not the politics of climate change, which is entirely the point of the game. I'll check out the link.
Glad you found the bibliography intriguing! I got my degree specialising in environmental history and then trained and (briefly!) worked as a history teacher, so I can't resist the urge to share texts with people. If you are interested in the politics of climate justice, I can also send you an epub version of Dunlap's book so you can read the chapter which our game is based on!
Unfortunately I don't have a digital copy of Dismantling Green Colonialism, which is a drier but more stark look at how large infrastructure projects (including renewable energy projects) are foisted on impoverished communities as a tool of domination and control (e.g. the EU using them as a tool of it's neo-colonial economic domination of Africa and the Middle East, while Morocco uses wind farms specifically to deny statehood to the Western Saharan peoples which it occupies), and that those with the biggest stakes in renewable projects are typically petro-chemical companies diversifying their portfolios to fund further unsustainable extraction.
I'll avoid lecturing any further, but thanks again for your interest in our game and our themes!
Thanks for the thoughtful reply! I think I have a few avenues to locate the texts myself to save the trouble. I briefly worked as a geography teacher incidentally! It's a welcome discussion, I hope the jam was an enjoyable inway to development that you continue, these sort of thought-provoking games are really commendable.