Zwan
Urustar Srl
Genova
We are a small game design team based in Italy. We create games for every platform, from digital games to location-based games, from board game to alternate reality games. We believe games are the defining entertainment form of this century, but we also believe they are an extraordinary way to teach and communicate.
Bosch Art Game
Zwan is an interactive exploration experience where you navigate a slowly decaying world and discover the works of Hieronymus Bosch hidden into it. The main idea is to give life to the works of Bosch, while enacting a metaphor of pain and madness. The more pain the player inflicts to themselves, the more dangerous and wicked the world becomes.
To explore Bosch’s world you have to take control of a white swan (Zwan, that is), which isn’t just the only playable character in the game but it also is what we figured could be interpreted as a Bosch’s alter-ego, ?ying through a three-dimensional space. At ?rst this world is extremely calm and peaceful, as it is in the ?rst part of Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. While you roam the space (you can only ?y) you can collect some floating eggs. You explore the world looking at all the strange creatures that are inside of it. Some elements in the world, though, can harm you. Every time you are harmed by a creature or a feature of the world, it goes one step further towards decay.
Your path begins from the Eden, passes through the Earth and ends with the Hell, where corruption reigns. You’ll notice that the green ?eld starts to wither and the heavenly landscape is now populated with strange, wicked creatures. The more the world decays, the more vicious and aggressive the creatures become. The collectible eggs of the previous stage disappear, replaced with new ones. So you have to explore the world through all the three stages to discover everything. When you feel you have collected all the eggs of a stage, follow the path of pain: hurt yourself in search for redemption.
Eventually the world will crumble to hell, and after some time you will die. At this point you’ll ?nd out that collected eggs unveil parts of some of the most famous works by Bosch. How many works will you recognise?
You can download the prototype at http://zwan.urustar.net
To explore Bosch’s world you have to take control of a white swan (Zwan, that is), which isn’t just the only playable character in the game but it also is what we figured could be interpreted as a Bosch’s alter-ego, ?ying through a three-dimensional space. At ?rst this world is extremely calm and peaceful, as it is in the ?rst part of Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. While you roam the space (you can only ?y) you can collect some floating eggs. You explore the world looking at all the strange creatures that are inside of it. Some elements in the world, though, can harm you. Every time you are harmed by a creature or a feature of the world, it goes one step further towards decay.
Your path begins from the Eden, passes through the Earth and ends with the Hell, where corruption reigns. You’ll notice that the green ?eld starts to wither and the heavenly landscape is now populated with strange, wicked creatures. The more the world decays, the more vicious and aggressive the creatures become. The collectible eggs of the previous stage disappear, replaced with new ones. So you have to explore the world through all the three stages to discover everything. When you feel you have collected all the eggs of a stage, follow the path of pain: hurt yourself in search for redemption.
Eventually the world will crumble to hell, and after some time you will die. At this point you’ll ?nd out that collected eggs unveil parts of some of the most famous works by Bosch. How many works will you recognise?
You can download the prototype at http://zwan.urustar.net