When you think of first-person video games, you usually imagine soldiers, guns, aliens, and general violence, right?
Not so for a Finnish video game developer who has designed a game focused on puzzle-solving and repairing dilapidated infrastructure whilst avoiding disasters like falling bridges and burst pipes.
City Lab reports:
“It was actually America’s dangerously outdated roads and levees that inspired Loiste Interactive’s Oskari Samiola to create “INFRA.” “The idea to make an infrastructure-themed game came after I watched the ‘Crumbling America’ documentary about the U.S.A.’s at-the-collapsing-point infrastructure,” says Samiola, who’s 22 and lives in Finland. “And generally after hearing news about spoiled tap water and seeing roads in poor condition.”
The protagonist is a Finnish engineer who recently got a job in Stalburg, a fictional Baltic metropolis that once was a flourishing mining hub. However, corporate corruption and disrepair have transformed it into a hazardous warren of cracked concrete and rusty metal. Your duty is to document and fix the deficiencies, using nothing but a camera and your handy flashlight. In look and feel it’s sort of like “Half-Life 2,” but instead of killing headcrabs you’re slowly fixing a city.”
For all infrastructure asset management practitioners – this is clearly the game to buy your kids, or yourself, for Christmas. (Complete with a note saying “my job is to make sure this kind of mess never happens.”).
But in all seriousness, it’s great to see that some game developers think that ruined infrastructure is just as worth fixing as an alien invasion or zombie apocalypse.
PHOTO CREDIT: Image grabbed from INFRA: Trailer – YouTube
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