Burgeon & Flourish; iOS
Fusing real movie footage and interactive free-association components, this is a compelling and at times enlightening experience
Once considered a creative cul-de-sac, the interactive movie – a video game made from filmed footage – is undergoing a renaissance. Like 2022’s Bafta-winning Immortality, Of Two Minds asks players to piece together a mystery from found footage, where the story is encountered out of sequence via scavenged clues. It’s unique in being composed from an actual movie, shot by film-maker Michael Bergmann in the 1980s then abandoned. Bergmann has revisited the archived footage and, with editor Lucas Tahiruzzaman Syed, reworked the material into a video game format.
The game tells the story of a middle-aged New Yorker and the various men in her life: her therapist, her gambling husband, her lover and his therapist. In essence it’s a game about psychoanalysis and the desires and traumas that shape how a person behaves. As you watch short clips play out, words appear on screen to describe the things said or done: “avoidance”, when we see someone take a painkiller; “traumatic response”, when we watch a character recoil at the sound of breaking glass, or perceive the face of an angry parent in a frustrated partner. Click on the words as they pass across the screen and you add them to a “theme” bank in your Filofax, to which the game returns after the clip plays out. Next, by selecting two theme words – “sex” and “aggression”, say, or “aggression” and “glass” – you trigger a new scene that relates to the clues.
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