There’s a very ambitious one man project happening in Scotland by Chris Tolworthy who is creating games based on some of the Western world’s greatest literature. So far he has covered Les Miserables, The Divine Comedy, Genesis of the Gods, and A Tale of Two Cities. He is currently working on The Count of Monte Cristo .
In each game you play a guardian angel named Peri. She can’t rest while anyone has problems – that’s just the kind of person she is. Everywhere she goes she finds herself in new stories with new people and new problems to solve.
Sometimes she finds herself as a character within the story, and other times she finds herself looking down from above.
The first three stories in Enter The Story form a trilogy, showing Peri’s origin and destiny. All the stories join together, making an ever larger world for Peri to explore. In Les Misérables we see the world she came from, her beginning as an angel, and her goal: to end suffering and find ultimate answers. In the Divine Comedy we see her journey through the heavens. Genesis of the Gods shows the awful truth: what she finds when she gets there.
All the locations in Enter The Story join together. So if you’re in Paris you might be playing Les Misérables, then if you turn a corner you might find yourself in A Tale of Two Cities and by pressing M you can easily get back.
The other characters can’t move back and forth between stories, only Peri (and you, the player) can do that.
Chris says:
I’m really selling a game world, a bookshelf, rather than individual stories, though people can buy them individually if they prefer. As you play the games you’ll recognize some of the same locations, an ever expanding world, starting in Paris, and later games will expand to London, the rest of Britain, America, and so on.
E.g. you’ll see on end of a street in Les Miserables and the other end of the same street in A Tale of Two Cities. The map in Les Miserables shows ATOTC links as well.
The imagery and gameplay are basic but it is just such an ambitious project and there has been so many improvements between Les Mis and ATOTC. Chris eventually plans to have games for each of Shakespeare’s 37 plays !
Currently you can download Les Miserables for free with the other titles priced at just $7.99 each or $14.99 for all four games (PC and Linux).
There is an extensive blog covering all aspects of the completed work and future projects as well as development stories etc at enterthestory.com which is well worth visiting
