First Dante’s Inferno, now this. Most Romantic Tales: Romeo & Juliet, an adventure game-style adaptation of Shakespeare’s tale of tragically doomed lovers who, it turns out, don’t have to be so doomed after all.
Available for $12.99 and developed by Baby Eish Games, Most Romantic Tales: Romeo and Juliet brings The Bard’s classic (and everyone’s favorite required high school reading) out of the dusty old footnote-heavy world of literature and into the modern realm of rudimentary point-and-click adventuring. The graphics look like a PS1-era cutscene, while the gameplay is basically going through dialogue trees and solving a basic puzzle or two.
And while Most Romantic Tales is far from Dante’s Inferno when it comes to the liberties it takes with the original, it does make some drastic changes that’ll get Shakespeareans up in a tizzy. For one, it modernizes all of the language into “contemporary colloquial American English.”
Even more controversial than that is the fact that you can change the ending of the play. It’s a tragedy, remember? Everybody dies. Well, not in this version. “You can follow the original storyline, or choose a happy ending,” Baby Eish Games writes.
Baby Eish Games, however, believe they’re not doing any disservice to the original by making it more palatable to modern tastes. In fact, they think they’re doing the opposite. “Shakespeare was an entertainer, not an academic,” a spokesperson told Virgin.net. “Frankly, we think he’d be pretty appalled at how we teach his plays at school. They’re meant to be enjoyed, and translating his works into computer games is a great way to reach the modern audience on their own ground.”
Try out the demo here.
[Via GameCulture, Fidgit]
Published: Mar 31, 2009 05:28 pm