Aftermath

Overview:

            In the wake of the Syrian Civil War, play as a young girl from the city of Aleppo as she tries to make it safely out of war-torn Syria and find asylum in another country, and as she struggles with her delusions about the world around her.

           

Story:

            Five years into a bloody civil war, all of Syria is in pain. Millions of innocent people have been killed and displaced by the rampant violence and destruction of the conflict. Caught between a dictator’s tyrannical regime and a myriad of tumultuous rebel factions, many of the Syrian people are left with no choice but to flee the country they loved so dearly. This is the story of one such refugee, a Syrian child, who is forced to fend for herself and find her way out of the country. Unbeknownst to her, as she traverses the ruined landscape and progresses toward someplace safer, her mind attempts to cope with the trauma of her situation by masking the terrible occurrences around her with playful fantasies. As she gets further along in her journey, the illusion she's constructed of the world slowly begins to unravel.  

 

Gameplay:

            The game plays as a basic side-scrolling platformer. The player moves left and right, jumps and crouches to progress through the landscape in order to reach destinations of personal importance to the protagonist. In the fantasy she has constructed in her mind, she has the power to transform/combine objects into useful tools (which in reality, is actually just her physically assembling the tools herself) which either remove obstacles that block her path or just generally aid her in getting through an area. In gameplay, this power will be accessed through a toggle button: the player will press X to go into magic mode, and then will point and click on objects scattered throughout the area that look peculiar. If they click the correct objects, those objects will morph/assemble into a useful item that will remove the obstacle that currently impedes the player's progress. 

 

Technology:

            With a simple graphical style and simple controls, there is no intensive technology requirement for this game. Care must be taken in assembling the environments though, as the key objects that the player must click on to get through a given area must be somewhat well camouflaged in the scenery.

 

Style:

            Representative of the protagonist's child-like mind and fantasy, the art of the game will be clean and simple. There will be an intentional disconnect between the lighthearted visuals and the heavy content of the story, as the desired goal is to get the player is to play through this child's seemingly innocuous fantasy, and then slowly piece together the clues to gradually realize that the subject matter of the game is in fact quite heavy.

 

Why:

The goal of this game is to humanize the experience of a refugee. We're living in a time when so many refugees from war-torn nations have to make the biggest decision of their lives to flee their homes for strange lands in hope of getting some safety and security. Too many people view refugees as just some statistic, or naively feel that they might be trojan horses for threats to Western nations' national security. The point of this game is to show the player that these are people just like you and I who are going through a tragedy. This is in hopes of evoking some serious thoughts and compassion within players of the game and getting them to see themselves in people who they might otherwise have viewed as alien.