The original soundtrack to Event[0] is now available on Bandcamp, YouTube and soon on all the streaming platforms.
The original soundtrack to Event[0] was composed by themushroomsound, Yllogique, Araignée du Soir and Swann Menage. This atmospheric album contains five tracks, and two songs in particular stand out: Hey Judy, a bittersweet ballad evoking loneliness and fragility, and Kaizen, a heavy robotic piece infused with dissonant sounds.
Listen to the album on Bandcamp:
Listen to the music on YouTube:
Event[0] is set in 2012 in a retro-futuristic alternative universe, where space travel has become commonplace since the 1980s. The main character manages to escape in his lifepod after his ship suffers a catastrophic failure on a mission to Europa. He is the only survivor, and his pod drifts for several weeks in the cosmos until it finally encounters a space leisure yacht.
Man and machine
The old yacht is still functional, but the only presence in this long-abandoned vessel is Kaizen-85. But who, or what, is Kaizen? Kaizen is in fact the ship’s artificial intelligence. The gameplay is minimalist in this first-person adventure and exploration game: open a door, switch a light on, activate an elevator, etc. Every interaction with the environment takes place by communicating with the machine via keyboard terminals.
But Kaizen isn’t always that cooperative, and the gameplay is therefore based on this unpredictable relationship between man and machine.
What happened to the crew? Only when he finds some clues can the player ever hope of returning home. Similar to a chatbot, the dialog with the IA is generated procedurally from some 2 million responses.
The great science-fiction works
The game will appeal to all lovers of sci-fi, whether you’re a fan of 2001 A Space Odyssey, Asimov’s robot series, Solaris or even Brave New World.
Event[0] was released on September 14, 2016. Started in 2013, it is therefore the result of 3 years’ work by a team of developers who met at ENJMIN (the French national school for video games and interactive digital media). The game began as a graduate student project but quickly attracted some very positive feedback from the public.
Prizes:
- Best student game 2014 at the European Indie Game Days
Finalist:
- Best student game 2014 at the Ping Awards
- Seumas McNally Grand Prize 2017 at the Independent Games Festival
- Excellence in Design and Excellence in Narrative awards 2017 at the Independent Games Festival
On the strength of this success, the team then formed the Paris studio Ocelot Society, and developed the game to make it what we see today. An accomplished gem of interactive (science-)fiction.