Intensive Care

Trauma reminded me of point-and-click adventures and Myst. But it feels really different. 

The whole project is part of my final thesis. I was studying design in the Köln International School of Design. They have a very different approach to design in general. When you select the project for your final thesis, you have more freedom to do what you want to do. I decided to do a videogame. It was my passion. I did a ton of research on point-and-click adventures, traced their entire history back to the roots—to text adventures, and find-your-own-adventure stuff.

Had you played any of those games before starting?

I played Myst as a child and really enjoyed it very much. Also, LucasArts adventures. Text adventures a little less; they were before my time. This research gave me the opportunity to look at this genre again, understand what makes it so great, and maybe what made it disappear at certain points. 

In the beginning, adventures had a very great advantage over other games in that they were very much about story, about things that relate to real life in many ways. [The other] games that came out at the same time were stuff like Breakout and Pong—very abstract, action-oriented stuff that doesn’t tell you anything, doesn’t tell you a story, doesn’t have any meaning. That was a very big advantage of adventure games, but with time, they lost this advantage because the action games and RPGs started adopting story elements, started being more lifelike, more realistic in many ways.