The Kidnapping of a Tokyo Game Developer

Kidnapping of a Tokyo Game Developer has comfortably the most bizarre setup of any game I’ve played so far in this year’s Comp – and that includes the explicitly surreal ones like the game where your body occasionally disintegrates into spaghetti. As it says on the tin, it opens with you and your brother raiding a Tokyo office building to perform the eponymous deed, resorting to violence in order to get human-being-who-actually-existed Kenji Eno to surrender his in-development game to your employers. But the gameplay, thankfully, doesn’t involve directly participating in the interrogation: rather, your brother’s browbeating of Eno, which involves running through a potted history of his bad-boy career making PS1- and 2-era survival horror games, is repeatedly interrupted by his (Eno’s) turtle going missing, which triggers him (your brother) to freak out and scream at you to find the animal, so you do that by solving an escalating series of puzzles as he (the turtle) climbs his way into more and more unlikely places.

So yeah, I was pretty lost here, though I was having fun with the anecdotes about the 90s Japanese development scene and the enjoyably over-the-top dialogue – until finally, well after I should have caught on, the game clicked and I realized why every bit of that premise is completely perfect. I won’t spoil what’s going on except to say I laughed quite a lot once I twigged to the twist, and found it added an additional fun layer through which to interpret the main action. But that main action works pretty well on its own, too. The narrative voice is lots of fun, with your brother’s frequent profanity obscured by stars, and entertainingly out-of-context gags. I liked this early bit, right after you restrain Eno:

"Your handiwork in tying down such a gentle giant could be compared to Gulliver’s Travels. Kenji Eno doesn’t make the comparison because his mouth is duct taped. You don’t make the comparison because you’re not here for literary allusions."

The game also makes a convincing case for Eno as an under-appreciated (at least in the West) artist. The best story is the one where he outfoxes the console approval process to get an uncensored version of one of his games onto store shelves without anyone the wiser, but even in the quieter bits of the history, as well as his interactions with you and your brother (which per the credits are drawn from actual interviews) he comes across as a thoughtful humanist trying to do something different from the mainstream, not just to shock but because he had something idiosyncratic to communicate – I can easily see how he’s become a cult figure.

As for the puzzles, they’re good examples of how to make such things work in Twine without going whole-hog into designing a parser-like interface. Most of the action plays out in a single combined kitchen/office (though there are occasional forays into other locations once you hit the midgame, including a maze that I think you’re guaranteed to solve just in the nick of time) with a bunch of different interactive features: a fridge, a stove, a cabinet. You can click on each one to interact with it, and for objects you can manipulate, like a stool you can shove around to different locations to help you climb when needed, the appropriate link cycles through to show where you’ve currently pushed it to. There’s perhaps a bit of fiddliness in the way you need to back out of examining stuff to try to climb around (most of the turtle-finding puzzles involve clambering around atop the furniture), and the final challenge maybe involves a slight bit too much busywork, but overall it’s a solid package that kept me engaged while I waited for the next bit of Eno’s career retrospective.

And that’s really where the heart of the game lies, I think. The twist I’m talking around gestures towards some contemporary questions about censorship and what counts as “age-appropriate” material, as does a slightly-didactic epilogue. The points raised are important ones, I think, and the way the game gets at them is unique. And possibly if I were one of the people unable to access a number of the Comp games due to the UK geoblock, that part of the story would be the one that resonated the most strongly. But since I’m American, it feels to me like the reason we don’t get as many video games with the artistry and sensitivity Eno appears to have brought to his stuff isn’t censorship (whether governmental or corporate), but because the mainstream industry has largely decided not to pursue those ends. That being the case, I’m walking away from Kidnapping thinking mostly about the ways he was able to get his games made in the face of a corporate culture no more welcoming to that kind of thing than the one we have now; I’m glad to have learned about his example.