Livber: Smoke and Mirrors Narrative Log - Inspirations

For about two days continuously (and intermittently for two months) I have been thinking about what the sources of inspiration for Livber were. I'm trying to calculate what caused me to pour Livber onto paper (onto pixels). In the end I realised that I couldn't do this (and of course, that I would).

Firstly Livber was a deep and personal story. It was based on things I had lived through. A toxic relationship from my past and the therapy process that followed formed Livber's dark and gothic tone. It's not possible for me to recount the entire process I went through here. For that there is already a whole text I have prepared, over sixty thousand words long.

Secondly there is not one single thing that brought Livber into being. There isn't a single work I can point my finger at and say, 'This was Livber's inspiration!' Everything I have seen, experienced, consumed and produced throughout my life has collectively created Livber. It's not possible for me to write down everything I have consciously or unconsciously consumed in my life.

Despite these two things there are some works that had a very obvious influence on Livber's creation, and that I wanted to have an influence.

Alan Moore - Swamp Thing Saga:

I've would like to praise Alan Moore for a quite while actually. Moore himself is the one person who showed me that writing could be a magical and sacred thing. But I don't think Moore is waiting on my praise.

The transitions of identity in Swamp Thing always affected me. The relationship between Alec Holland and Swamp Thing is actually quite similar to the conflict between Elbek's mind and the person he wants to be. Neither of them (Swamp Thing and Elbek) are the people they think they are. So who are they? An illusion, a delusion, a mistake. The people they thought they were died years ago and got stuck in the swamp. Their bodies have rotted and all that is left of them is a handful of consciousness. They are in a hopeless search.

This is a very strange situation if you think about it. You think you are someone, you think you are a person whose existence has a conclusion. And yet something you never even thought to think was wrong turns out to be truly wrong. Afterwards you begin a desperate search for this personality. Because there is nothing else you can do. What can you do other than try to take back the thing that makes you "you"? And at the end of this journey you realise that you can never reach the thing that makes you. In Swamp Thing this continued by telling the story of the swamp putting itself into a new, different and 'correct' form. In Livber I wanted to handle this step a little differently. In Elbek's story there is nothing that can put him into a 'correct' form. That is why Livber is in fact a horror story told within a vast emptiness. The thing you are hopelessly trying to reach is not there, and the thing you are trying to reach is not in itself good or virtuous.

The personality crises and identity quests of the Swamp Thing Saga show themselves in Livber's foundations. And very closely at that.

Saga of the Swamp Thing - Anatomy Lesson

Neil Gaiman - Sandman:

Before Gaiman soured his own image, I was a huge Gaiman fan. One of the first books I read, the thing that pulled me out of hard times, were Gaiman's magical realist stories.

The basis of the magical realism seen in Livber actually comes from the stories of Sandman. The transformation of impossible things into deeply fundamental realities, and their unquestioning acceptance, were things I put forward inspired by Gaiman's stories. One of the things I based the complex entanglement of dream and myth on was Sandman's storytelling technique.

It's not really possible to find Sandman or Gaiman's style directly in Livber. But this is a structure that merged with my own voice a long time ago. A deep-seated truth in every story. 'Catching the Wind' in my story collection series was the story where I tried to show this the most.

ZA/UM - Disco Elysium:

Disco was something that showed me games could be a work of art. It was a structure I grew tired of reading, that I cried while reading, where I saw how politics could deeply affect people. But forget all that. Those are surface-level things.

The best thing Disco did was to be a poetic manifesto for how deep someone could fall and what a grey structure they could take on. After a whole century of seeing flawless, brave, charismatic and strong characters in games, seeing someone flawed felt magnificent. Yes, games are as powerful as the fantasies they feed but Disco showed that this doesn't always have to be true. It showed how good it felt to be in the flawed sharp lines of reality instead of the grey smoke of fantasy somewhere out there. Elbek is this, blended with horror.

Harry DuBois was finding himself while investigating a death. He was a detective. The murder had been committed by someone else for other motives. But Elbek is the one who committed the murder and he doesn't have to solve it. He has to suffer the punishment for it.

Livber, no matter how much it tries not to seem it, is a detective story mixed in with gothic horror and romanticism. There is a death, but the thing it possesses and the question it asks is not a classic 'whodunnit'. The mystery to be solved in the game is not the answer we will give to the question 'Who?' That's why we break down the mystery at the very beginning of the game. It was I who killed 'her'.

Most detective games aim to answer the question, who? Whodunnit? But this was not the question I wanted to ask. The thing we had to solve was the answer to the question 'Why?' And when we found the answer to the question we had to be subjected to the revenge for this murder.

And this is the most Disco-esque part of the game. A flawed character finds himself in his inner world. DE allowed you to manipulate this as you wished. You could live as a Superstar Cop, a Hobo Cop, an Apocalypse Cop… It was possible for you to change reality and affect the world going on somewhere out there. This is also exactly where we part ways with Disco. Livber is not flexible enough to allow for this manipulation. Due to material and time constraints we couldn't advance far enough to do it. But somewhere out there my own Disco variant exists. The variant of the 'flawed protagonist' structure opened up by Disco, adapted by me.

I never wanted to write Livber in the style of DE. Even though Disco will always be my biggest inspiration, the sole work that shows how inner monologues and the characterisation of emotions can be done, I never wanted to remake it. Disco was already made. Disco cannot be made again. It was a magnificent failure, one that like communism, had only a single bullet. And it gloriously fired that single bullet into its own mouth, splattering its brains across the walls of ZA/UM. Disco ended in the most Disco-esque way possible.

Livber was an attempt to interpret the pieces of Disco's brain and try them out in someone else. By InEv, we aimed for it to be in the horror genre, more flawed (if that's even possible) and set in a foreign universe. We did not set out on this path to make a new Disco. And what emerged was not a new Disco. It was something different, made with its mind, another failure that would end with the same glorious finale.

Un jour je serai de retour près de toi

Mark Z. Danielewski - House of Leaves:

House of Leaves was a book I could never finish. I suppose Danielewski never wanted this book to be read as a 'normal' book with a beginning and an end.

This book was a comprehensive madness where impossible events occurred in a non-existent universe of non-existent things. This was the most important thing that formed the mental texture of Livber. This book was the most solid proof of how obsessive madness could look on paper (pixel! on pixel damn it!). House of Leaves showed how a madness that is calm, that comes slowly, that you see coming but can never escape, should be.

The cellars under Lilith's house come entirely from the endless, infinite corridors of the Navidson Record. A place beyond the limits of time and space and more importantly, the mind, where you can walk forever and exit only a metre away from where you entered, forms the (non-existent) spatial integrity of Livber.

Remedy Entertainment - Alan Wake 2

Alan Wake 2 was a game I spent hours on, a game I studied, played, and adored every single moment of. A work of art where the products of Stephen King's, Twin Peaks', and the late David Lynch's mad minds come together and are magnificently visualised. I was deeply affected by Alan Wake's success in beautifully blending Danielewski's spatial shifts, Moore's magic in writing, and Gaiman's weird reality, and transforming it all into an interactive work.

To taste the loneliness that comes with writing and the 'mental constipation' that accompanies producing a work of thought… it is certainly a feeling that must be experienced. AW is a lesson in how it allows you to see this first-hand and shows you how a loop you cannot escape from consumes a person. Elbek's adventure is also at a point quite close to Wake's transformation. Elbek too is inside a loop he cannot escape, trying to break free from a story written by himself but also changed by himself. He remembers, and as he remembers, he is pulled even deeper into the cursed cycle. Each loop is at least as much the same as the last, yet each loop is utterly different from the other. The darkness in his mind takes over and rewrites the story from the beginning.

Along with these I also tried to break down and rebuild some minor philosophical perspectives in my mind over a long period. Nietzsche's inability to ever face the inevitable, the unavoidable conflict between determinism and existentialism and the series of abandonments I created as a result of my never being able to properly decide between the two… Below I am writing some other works that I was inspired by and that come to mind.

Silent Hill 2 - Silent Hill was a game I discovered very late, and one that showed how game mechanics can be interwoven with the game's story. With its deep atmosphere and its spot-on story hook, it managed to grip me right from the title screen. I tried to use the same hook at the beginning of Livber.

Francis Bacon - I took reference for the feelings of disgust a self-loathing person feels when looking in the mirror from Bacon's portraits.

Junji Ito - I was greatly inspired by Ito's manga on the subjects of body deformation, madness and decay. A masterful hand when it comes to visualising horror.

Frankenstein - Mary Shelley's iconic book had always been the subject of a different interpretation for me. (Such an interpretation is no longer possible.) The creature that pursues the creator who made it forms a repeatable and universal basis for identity conflicts.