One of video gaming’s great strengths is letting players step into worlds that previously only existed in words or on canvas or celluloid. Lush fantasy kingdoms, sprawling sci-fi universes, and of course surrealist dreamscapes where people have music printed on their butts.
Admittedly, that last one is a relatively recent addition to gaming’s ever-expanding map of the human imagination. It comes courtesy of Hieronymus, an in-development FPS based on the works of late-medieval Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch.
Revealed at the Future Games Show during Gamescom, Hieronymus lets players explore 3D adaptations of Bosch’s most famous works, such as his best-known triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. It sees you play as a woman named Helena van Aken as she attempts to unravel the mystery of her family’s association with otherworldly powers, all while accompanied by none other than Faust himself. Or at least, the real-life alchemist who inspired the folk legend.
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The trailer shows the player wandering through marshlands dotted with bulbous structures and mermaid knights, evading giant beasts as they stomp around the map, and watching some poor fellow get munched by a giant humanoid creature with a parrot’s head.
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Aesthetically, Hieronymus is instantly enticing. But how will Hieronymus actually play? Well, according to the game’s steam page, you’ll be able to battle enemies with period-accurate weapons like a crossbow and an arquebus, employ alchemy to create projectiles that can stun creatures and influence their behaviour, and even catch and tame some of the weird critters that you’ll find stumbling around.
Watching Hieronymus in action, my gut reaction is that visually it looks splendid, but mechanically it seems to need some work. The movement looks plodding and sluggish, while combat and interactions look quite slow and floaty and not especially engaging. Which is not to say I expect a game based on the works of Hieronymus Bosch to play like Doom Eternal, although now that I’ve thought about it, I really want to play an id Software/Hieronymus Bosch mashup.
I’m also curious to see how developer Hurdy-Gurdy Games deals with the fact that artworks like The Garden of Earthly Delights have a quite spectacular number of butts in them—which is something that Steam seems increasingly censorious about.
At the very least, I would expect the developers to replicate the butt which has musical notation printed on it—located in the panel of Earthly Delights that depicts hell. This particular rear end went viral several years ago after a tumblr blogger spotted the music inked across the cheeks of one of Bosch’s tortured souls, then transcribed and recorded it for your listening pleasure.
Yet with or without the butt-music from hell, Hieronymus still looks like an intriguing prospect. A release date hasn’t been announced yet, but I wouldn’t expect to play it until next year at the earliest.
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