An Actually Existing Dystopia: Othering Eastern Europe and the Lived Experience of an Authoritarian Regime in Black: The Fall

Abstract

Sand Sailor Studio, a small Romanian indie game developer company launched a Kickstarter project to fund the development of their game Black: The Fall in 2014. After having more than 1,600 people backing their pitch, they could finish their 2.5D puzzle-platformer set in a bleak dystopic past/future and published it in 2017, receiving mostly positive reviews. The paper argues that Black: The Fall inscribes a more general Orwellian dystopia into a dystopified version of Romania’s socialist past in order to present it as a commodity for Western audiences, leveraging on the perceived uniqueness of Romanian history and hence reinforcing the image of Eastern Europe as an ‘other at hand?’. While the visuals support what we can call a mediatised experience of the late Ceausescu-era, the game mechanic and affective qualities of playing may be capable of offering a more nuanced impression of the 1980s in Romania as a lived experience.