Oscar-nominated film The Banshees Of Inisherin has been transformed into a free Pac-Man style arcade game, which tasks players with getting Brendan Gleeson’s character Colm Doherty to the pub with all of his fingers.
Titled Banshees The Game, the 8-bit video game adaptation has been created by Cogs & Marvel (via Rock Paper Shotgun).
The goal of the game is to navigate Colm through an Irish countryside maze, collecting all of his severed fingers before making his way to the pub in the centre. Along the way, Colm is hounded by the island’s locals, including “boring Colin” who wants to know why Colm doesn’t like him anymore, Barry Keoghan’s “local gobshite” Dominic, and even Jenny the donkey.
The 8-bit video game adaption can be played through browsers here.
“Now you too can experience the chills and spills of Irish cultural repression in 8-bit,” reads a blog post announcing the game.
In the blog, Cogs & Marvel’s creative director Jon Hozier-Byrne described telling “a complex story in the simplest narrative form” as an “interesting challenge”.
“St Patrick’s Day, like the film which inspired us, is an exploration of Irish socio-cultural identity,” added Hozier-Byrne. “For one day a year, political and historical baggage is cast aside, leaving only bright green hats and drinking. We wanted to apply the same kind of dramatic over-simplification to such rich cultural material.”
“There was something really fun about taking such a dark, atmospheric piece of storytelling and representing it through the saturated optics of retro gaming,” he continued. “That juxtaposition is very entertaining to me.”
Though The Banshees Of Inisherin and its cast were up for nine Oscars on Sunday (March 12), the critically-acclaimed film didn’t manage to win any of the awards it was nominated for.
In other gaming news, Lady Gaga producer BloodPop has launched a game studio to “change the shooter genre”.
