'Titanic: Honor and Glory' Aims To Allow Players To Explore All of the RMS Titanic

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The game Titanic: Honor and Glory launched an IndieGogo campaign recently.

Created by Four Funnels Entertainment, a team consisting of project manager/director/write Tom Lynskey, interior modeler/legal/accounting member Matthew DeWinkeleer and technical and exterior modeler/Unreal programmer Kyle Hudak, is a murder mystery set aboard the famous RMS Titanic. Players will take control of Robert Morgan, a man falsely accused of murder who has to clear his name while still aboard the Titanic.

His story inevitably and tragically intersects with the historic sinking of the massive vessel, the largest ship in the world at the time of its maiden voyage.

He, and through him the players, must race against the clock to clear his name while the ship sinks in real time below their feet.

The most exciting element of the game, however, is not so much its story but in the ambitious scope of the setting. The team has set out to digitally recreate the entirety of the RMS Titanic, rendering it fully transversable by the player character.

Furthermore, they are attempting to add as many real-life passengers and crew of the Titanic as possible, with particular emphasis on often-overlooked figures such as Masabumi Hosono, the only Japanese passenger, Joseph Laroche, one of the few black passengers on board, and Helen Candee, early feminist and author.

The game seems set to offer not just its own narrative of murder and redemption aboard the sea but to attempt to dive deep into its intersection and intertwining with the real-life history of its setting.

This offers a keen opportunity as a video game. One of the powers of the medium is its ability to lean further away from the heavily controlled narratives of film and prose.

Film, like music (especially recorded music), typically has a fairly subservient relationship to pacing and, through that, time; films and recorded music typically take a finite amount of time chosen by the creator and not the audience.

Live performances and prose and comics, and serial television in a way, work a little more freely, offering a typically set direction for the content but allowing the pace to be chosen or at least affected by the audience in a much more direct way than something like prerecorded film and music.

Games, however, offer a more direct interactivity with its subject matter that can allow for those time barriers to be erased. Key elements of the rising knowledge of theory regarding video games as their own medium focuses on the psychological conflation of audience and playable character as well as narrative with the gameplay and setting itself, as opposed to a fairly directly cinematic or prosaic experience that is accompanied by images with mild interactivity.

Titanic: Honor and Glory looks to push further into the territory of fully conflating setting, narrative, and gameplay, offering up the ability to fully roam the Titanic as a fictional character who can bear witness to the real movements, based on journals, diaries, and other documents available, of the real-life passengers and crew on-board.

The coupling of this wider sandbox-style exploratory model of setting with a more direct fictional narrative to act as a hook for the player to enter and immerse themselves in not only the world of the game but also that of the RMS Titanic offers the opportunity to dive into a relationship between text, object and audience that only games can offer.

They are currently seeking $250,000 with stretch goals beyond and at the time of writing have acquired pledges for $9,800.

As of writing, the IndieGogo campaign has two months till completion. You can check out more about the project at their IndieGogo page or their website.

Image taken from Titanic: Honor and Glory's IndieGogo page.