Nigredo

This game demo is my senior project, the final piece I will ever create at MCAD. It spans two years of research and a lifetime of trying to understand what my place in the world is.

Nigredo is a narrative game experience using the historic treatment of the Filipino identity in America as well as my personal experiences dealing with those ramifications today. The narrative of the game follows a character named Hewitt as they travel to a hospital after a major war to try to find information that faded from public knowledge in the recent past. In doing so, they meet the three residents of the hospital and, with varying levels of realization, they are all Frankenstiens, creatures made from the body parts of other people. This demo seeks to establish the characters and setting, allowing the player to explore at their own pace and become familiar with the gameplay elements.

Nigredo seeks to reinterpret the Filipino American experience using Frankenstiens as a metaphor for our lives, a group of people whose identity was entirely shaped by the public majority in the early 1900s as a colonized people. 100 years later, conditions have not improved and instead we are an invisible minority, even as the second largest Asian American group. There is little to no wider public representation of Filipino in America and Nigredo aims to examine that and the generational trauma that comes with this marginalized experience.

Controls:

[ Z ] or [ SPACE ] - interact with environment

[ X ] - open menu

Arrow Keys - Move the Character

"Bubbles" indicate intractable objects

If you do not know what to do next, the "Hint" option in the menu will remind you of your objective.

This demo takes between 15-25 minutes to complete, depending on how thorough you wish to be.