By [ad_1]
Exploring the whitewashing of American history with immersive, explorative storytelling, Blackhaven is an uncomfortable and important game.
Blackhaven isn’t a game about entertainment or making players feel good about their accomplishments. Instead, it presents an accurate account of histories often hidden from view and asks players to take ownership in bringing the truth to light. At times infuriating and moving, Blackhaven is a look at history in a way rare for both video games and history lessons.
The first game from developers Historiated Games, Blackhaven is a first-person mystery game that operates a lot like an interactive novel. The protagonist Kendra Turner is a summer intern at the Blackhaven Hall Historical Society. Players help her navigate a series of standard intern tasks like testing out a guided tour or scanning documents. However, as they go throughout their day, they uncover more and more evidence that Blackhaven hides a tumultuous past, a history that is being purposefully kept from the public.
Players interact with Blackhaven through a standard WASD and point-and-click interface. For moments when they have to interact more closely with documents or workplace objects, a set of additional keys becomes available for scrolling or flipping pages. But Blackhaven isn’t really a game about interesting mechanics and futuristic UI design –it knows when to get the crunchy functionality out of the way and let it work in service of the story.
As a mystery game, Blackhaven is lackluster. There are few moments of choice, and even its free exploration is bounded to the museum and house and the intern’s workday. However, thought of in terms of an interactive story, Blackhaven starts to shine. Its 3D world, from the meticulously modeled, period-accurate colonial architecture to the windowless archives, fully immerses players in a way uncommon for exploration games. It also helps to emphasize the game’s narrative, which is both compelling from a gameplay standpoint and incredibly important.
Aside from being an interesting game, Blackhaven carries a crucial message of representation. Players uncover emails from Kendra’s boss about how they resented bringing someone from an HBCU on board but did it for diversity credit. It’s a gut-wrenching read that drives home how (unfortunately) unique Kendra is in her industry but also as a Black woman protagonist in a video game. In a quest for representation, Blackhaven‘s release is timed well after the huge popularity of the Into the Motherlands RPG Kickstarter and “Summer of Aabria” as Aabria Iyengar takes over as Dungeon Master for popular actual-play shows Critical Role and Dimension 20.
To ground Blackhaven in reality, Kendra was voiced by successful TokToker and former HBCU student Darby Farr. Her annoyed asides as she peruses the whitewashed history of the Blackhaven museum draw needed attention to the way that history is presented in such places: as belonging to wealthy, white men. Farr brings this to life perfectly, with a heaping scoop of sarcasm that makes her commentary at once poignant and funny.
Farr isn’t the only success behind the creation of Blackhaven. The game’s research and writing is a product of collaboration between current and former HBCU students and a professor of Mass Communication from Xavier University alongside a historian and professor of Game Art at the University of Connecticut. Steeping the game’s design and writing in an intimate knowledge of the type of history often brushed under the rug gives Blackhaven an added dose of authenticity.
One particularly interesting decision that Historiated Games made with Blackhaven was to give some weight to Kendra’s — and the player’s — decisions by giving her something to lose. Kendra is trying to save money to pay for a trip to Greece, and she excitedly comments on the Greek columns of Blackhaven house and has even set her phone background to represent this ancient architecture. After learning the secrets of Blackhaven, however, she must choose between keeping her job and continuing to work toward her trip to Greece or giving it all up for a chance to tell Blackhaven’s real story.
Kendra’s interest in Greek civilization comes at a time when classical studies programs at HBCUs are being cut and Black professors and students are made to feel unwelcome in a field often used to bolster nationalism and white supremacy. This handful of tiny references to her love of classics sets a tone of unease. As Kendra discovers an increasingly upsetting history of the Blackhaven house (and its modern management) and takes on the task of airing its racist truth, she’s also motivated by participation in a field that would have her do the same. It’s an embedded reminder that while Blackhaven the game showcases the damaging labor Kendra must undertake, it’s just one example of many she will face in her lifetime.
Blackhaven is clearly a game with a didactic purpose — it’s not just trying to provide entertainment or to tell a story, but to teach players something. Its lessons — that histories are subjective and those who tell stories have biases both intentional and otherwise — have never been more important.
The game isn’t perfect. Occasionally players are asked for two different types of interaction to achieve the same goal, like flipping pages in a file with a “d” key or an arrow key. Sometimes the animations are a little long, and waiting to replace files in archive boxes can lose some of the momentum built up from uncovering Blackhaven’s secrets. But ultimately, none of that matters. Blackhaven is successful in what it sets out to do: drawing players into an interactive history that showcases just how subjective history-telling can be and who pays the price for that.
Blackhaven is developed and published by Historiated Games and will be available at no cost on July 27 on PC. A review copy was provided to CBR by the publisher.
About The Author
[ad_2]
