What does it mean to recreate your old home in a video game?
Sometimes a home only becomes a home when you leave. I recently moved out from a London flat I’d rented for over a decade, for instance, and this has properly done a number on me. Being given my notice transformed the place from a transient pile of cadaverous lino and spasmodic plumbing into something mythical and unnerving – a whole chapter of my life completed and reduced to a piece of masonry in the rearview mirror, a relic I had been living in for years without quite realising.
A few video game developers have investigated emotions like these by recreating their current and prior homes as virtual environments: places of mingled memory and invention, expressive of both nostalgia and surprise. At this year’s Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, I interviewed a couple of teams who are coming at this premise with very different objectives, and somehow, meeting in the middle. One of the games in question is a work of daydreaming fondness, the other of comical anger. Both find a focus in the figure of a matriarch who is kindly in one game, abusive in the other.
My old flat had plentiful downsides, but I at least got on with my landlord. The same can’t be said for your character in Janet DeMornay Is A Slumlord (And A Witch). Devised by Australian devs Fuzzy Ghost, it’s a queer horror comedy set in a house where the mould has eyes, the toilet appears to be wallpapered with flesh, and the oven has become a wormhole. As you amble woozily around the house in your pants, searching for your tenancy agreement, the titular Janet begins to haunt you. After all, she has a right to see what you’re doing in her house. Why won’t you answer the door?
Based on 20 minutes with an early build, it’s a clever, shlocky experience that makes no bones of its class politics, without being reducible to them. “It’s about landlord overreach,” explains the Steam page. “It’s about a legal system built by landlords for landlords. It’s about being a queer and having a found family. It’s also about a witch.”
JDM’s paranormal trashpad is, in fact, based on a terrace house in Sydney, which Fuzzy Ghost’s Pete Foley and Scott Ford had the displeasure of renting from around 2013 to 2020. “Sydney is super expensive but this had been a student hand-me-down house for a decade or so, so it was really cheap for inner Sydney,” Foley tells me. “We ended up leaving after we found that the floorboards under the head of our bed had been eaten away by black mould.” The developers were offered a $20-per-week rent discount in return for no longer using the main bedroom. This was “not tempting,” says Foley. (He doesn’t name the landlord concerned, but I’m guessing their name isn’t actually Janet DeMornay.)
One thing that fascinates me about the idea of recreating your home in something as fiddly as a video game is how the process might inadvertently become critique, as the practicalities of adaptation reveal qualities not quite apparent to the dweller. JDM uses fixed camera perspectives, for instance, jammed into the corners of rooms and hallways, and framing things this way has made Foley think twice about the confines of the old house.
“I realised just how wide and long the areas are in the first two Resident Evil games,” he says. “The narrowness of a Sydney terrace has been nightmarish for a set-camera. There’s so many angles needed to show every nook and cranny, and doors in annoying places. It’s been a lot of work trying to choose the right angles to not frustrate players.” Art director Scott Ford has been more “more impressionistic in recreating the texture of the house,” Foley says. “It’s more the feel of it, rather than getting it true to life.”
One byproduct of working on JDM is that Ford and Foley now have memories of two, entangled editions of their squalid fixer-upper. “It’s been weird finding that my memories of living in the house are starting to be replaced by the game taking place there,” Foley comments. “There’s an upstairs bedroom that is quite a faithful reproduction of our furniture and layout and I have to force myself to think of real memories of that room instead of it being ‘Jam’s bedroom, where X puzzle takes place.'”
There’s perhaps some slight anxiety here. While JDM is a phantasmagoric creation, Fuzzy Ghost are keen to preserve certain aspects of the house and the city beyond. This isn’t their first work of architectural memoir. “We always feel called to recreate where we live,” Foley comments. “It’s so rare to see Australian cities depicted in games. There’s an area in our previous game, Queer Man Peering Into A Rock Pool.jpg, that is a series of photogrammetry buildings, and [the house from JDM] is one of them, it was our street. Our first game Pebble Witch was set in a chibi recreation of the beach town – Kiama.”
JDM might parody the location that inspired it, but it does so… well, I’m not sure “lovingly” is the word, but there’s a certain affection. After all, Ford and Foley lived out many years of their lives in that terrace house, and much has changed. “We often lament that there’s very little film and no games, as far as I’m aware, that capture the Brisbane city that we grew up in, in the early 2000s,” Foley goes on. “And while Janet is set in a fictitious version of Sydney we always hope to try and capture something that records the moment in time, even if it’s just the view of the brutalist UTS Tower out the window being alone – there’s now many taller buildings around it.”
In StudioBando’s Sopa – Tale Of The Stolen Potato (Steam page here), a magic realist adventure set in South America, home is more a thing to reimagine than recall, because home is where you tell stories. The game casts you as the bright-eyed Miho, who is helping his grandmother fix dinner. Sent into the larder to fetch a fateful tuber, Miho has a confrontation with a giant, thieving frog and is dragged through a portal to the shore of a fabulous river.
After riding the rapids in pursuit of the stolen potato, he ends up in a black market populated by a whole clan of garrulous Kermits, including a grandmother frog awaiting her birthday cake. These bursts of mildly Freudian outlandishness take inspiration from movies such as Spirited Away, The Little Prince, and Coco, but the house that provokes them is based on studio CEO Juan Castaneda’s own childhood.
“It’s almost the exact layout of my grandmother’s house, back in this small rural town, lost in the middle of Colombia,” he says. “Everything is is filtered through Miho’s take on it, but everything does have a reference to some degree, large or small.
“So for example, the river is based on hearing these stories from my family growing up, of a river that ran through the back of their house, and all the stories that they have there. And that would have transformed the house into this magical place. Even the black market in the game is… there’s a lot of places that have that sort of stilt-like architecture, but of course, we’ve pushed it to another degree, to make it feel more magical.”
This isn’t just autobiography, Castaneda qualifies. Sopa makes itself at home in a tradition of oral narrative as much as a specific time and place. “It’s a lot more about taking family stories that you’d hear that would sort of become tall tales, as they were passed down from generation to generation, and sort of what you perceive that story to be, when you would hear it as a kid, and being in that space.”
The physical contours of the house are important, however. Sopa’s magic realist elements are enclosed and grounded by the act of finishing the cooking. Miho’s escapades – are they daydreams? Or actual gallivants to different worlds? – all eventually lead back to his grandmother at her chopping board. “Each time you go on one of these fantastic adventures and have fun with these talking frogs, there are going to be little elements that are always in a way, echoing back to the kitchen, echoing back to Nana,” Castenada comments. The dish being prepared serves as a narrative design framework, providing a “central hub for exploring these different stories, and threading them through the main key story of the game.”
Now that I’ve written both games up, Miho’s relationship with his grandmother feels like the benign version of the friction between tenant and rentier on show in Janet DeMornay Is A Slumlord (And A Witch). Both matriarchs haunt the location in different ways. Where JDM’s otherworldly elements are invasions, Sopa’s fantastical interludes are a kind of mischievous rebellion. They’re childish projections born of being told to be a good boy, do your chores and stop messing with the furniture.
Miho’s Nana acts as a curb on his delusions, while also being the source of them. It reminds me of how my own dad would try to discourage my infantile habit of seeing flying snakes and crocodiles in the walls, while also telling me bedtime stories about a mad carrot who lived in our fridge.
“A lot of it is based on that experience of feeling like you’re in this space that you have to be very careful around, and your instinct is to run around and bump into things,” Castenada comments. I’m not sure we ever outgrow that impulse, really. It makes me wonder what kind of tenant Miho would be, if he ever lived in a house owned by somebody like Janet DeMornay. Hopefully, he’ll do better. At the very least, I hope he holds out for a posher grade of lino.