Palestinian developer Rasheed Abueideh has announced Dreams On A Pillow, a mixture of stealth-adventure and interactive documentary set during the Nakba - Israel's violent displacement and dispossession of Palestinian Arabs in 1948, shortly after Israel's founding. Created by "a global team of veteran game developers", it's the story of a Palestinian woman grappling with the loss of her baby after fleeing a bloody assault on her town.
Here's a description of the game, via press release.
"Dreams on a Pillow is a pseudo-3D Stealth-Adventure game based on the true Palestinian folktale of Omm - a Palestinian mother who fled the massacre of her town with her new-born child. After running for an hour in sheer panic, she realized that she had carried a pillow to safety, instead of her child. Inspired by the story, Dreams on a Pillow explores Omm's life story, showcasing both the history of Palestine before the ethnic cleansing of the lands, and the trauma borne from the violence that was inflicted upon the Palestinian people during the Nakba."
According to the announcement materials, Omm's journey as a refugee takes her through the sites of several atrocities, including concentration camps and attacks on Palestinians near the Lebanese border. Whenever she is able to rest, the game switches into a documentary mode, "reliving a rapidly fading memory of a pre-Zionist Palestine" by means of archive imagery and text.
Omm's principle possession is the pillow, which serves as both a terrible reminder of her lost child and a kind of coping device. When carrying it, she's not able to interact with objects or do things like jump, crawl, throw rocks and climb ladders. Putting the pillow down, however, triggers Omm's guilt and trauma, provoking nightmares that "reveal dangers of the mind, and shroud the dangers of the real world". The immediate practical challenge during the stealth-adventure sections, then, is to complete whatever objectives are at hand and retrieve the pillow before Omm's delusions overwhelm her.
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