Icarus Needs

Abstract

Icarus Needs is a hypercomic adventure game in which the game’s protagonist - struggling cartoonist Icarus Creeps - has fallen asleep playing videogames and become trapped inside a surreal, metafictional dream world. The intent with Icarus was to create a hybrid of comics and videogames – something that both reads like a comic and plays like an adventure game (or interactive fiction). The work was created as part of my current practice-lead doctoral study into the impact of digital mediation on the comics form. My specific goal with Icarus was to create a simulated world that the player could explore, interrogate and solve via the medium of the comics. Unlike a normal comic, the narrative is not laid out in advance for the reader to read through and absorb but instead created via the player's exploration and interaction with the comics-mediated world presented in the game