Velvet 89 is a free hidden object game that tells the story of communist Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Revolution” in 1989, which brought an end to 41 years of one-party rule and led to the founding of a parliamentary republic. The game released earlier this month, and you can find it on Steam, iOS and Android. I know nothing about the Velvet Revolution, but I do have some quick thoughts on the use of a format I associate with Where’s Wally to capture a process of extraordinary political change.
Velvet 89 is the work of Charles Games, creators of Attentat 1942. It explores five protests in four cities, moving from “cautious ecology-themed protests” to the “moments before police brutally attacked a peaceful demonstration”. Each chapter is introduced with a mix of captions and archive footage, and consists of a zoomable view of the crowd, rendered in “a style reminiscent of paper cut-outs”. There’s some gentle animation and an enveloping burble of background noise, but the scene is overall static.
The first thing I noticed is that everybody is looking up at the viewer, as though you were some local governor who has appeared on a balcony to address the citizens. It’s interestingly eerie. Also eerie: nobody has a face. I’m not sure how I feel about this, but Velvet 89 seems to be trying for a balance of connection and impersonality, rediscovering individuals while keeping the emphasis on the collective and the community.
In each chapter you must find a small number of individuals and hear their stories. You can track them down by way of the portraits along the bottom: click on them, and you’ll be given a hint such as (paraphrasing) “she came as soon as she’d picked her daughter up from school” or “he stepped back from the advancing police line”. Find that person, and you can click on them to zoom in further and hear their reasons for joining the march. Again, there’s a slight sense of foreboding here. If the zoomed-out view suggests a mayor on a balcony, zooming in calls to mind a surveillance operative working their way down a list of names.
The stories give you a sense of the growing solidarity between different generations and demographics – punk rockers, students, elderly dog-walkers, even the cops. The writing is didactic but not deflatingly so. It’s based on testimonies gathered by the Czech project Stories of Injustice. As the press release explains, it seeks to show “how the revolution gained momentum, from the border regions onto the squares of Prague and further”.
Disquieting undertones aside, I like the staggered intimacy of the game’s hidden object structure. The hints break up the monolithic facelessness of the crowd, guiding you into somebody’s story in a simple but effective way. I’m not sure I ‘trust’ the experience, however, inasmuch as it edits out the movement of bodies during protest marches, the way the mood surges and falls away, and the perilous shifting proximity between protestors and police. Still, I’m quite compelled by the game. It makes me want to write something longer about the political and historical framing of hidden object experiences at large. I’d be interested to read your thoughts. Again, you can download Velvet 89 for free on Steam.