In Kommissar, you take the role of a regime commissar. A perfect designed gear for the machine of peace & wealth utopia.
Your duty and commitment is to lead the Ministry of Truth and to keep the Independent City-State of Roulettenburg united under the regime's iron fist.
Mobilize its agents, neutralize the insurgents in the districts, interrogate the suspects and watch out for your fellow citizens whilst capturing dissidents all for
the glory of your fatherland.
Game Features
Discover a new challenge in each game.
The social context of Roulettenburg and its citizens motivations will be different every time you play.
Investigate profound and harsh story arcs that will
not let you indifferent. You will be presented to moral dilemmas that will make you question reality as you know it.
Confront all possible outcomes of a story which take form
through your actions and the alliances and loyalties that your forge.
Interrogate captured suspects and choose wisely your actions.
Judge between either being magnanimous or pushing them to the limit as you bear the consequences.
Embody the regime and do your duty as a respected member of the party.
Go wherever is required and obey the orders.
Manipulate the events to pursue your own interests.
After all, you are the truth and the truth is power.
The world of Kommissar
We start from a world which is in permanent state of crisis and conflict. A globalized world where nations are meaningless, since their sovereignties obey a supranational order controlled by immense corporations. All cities now follow a common pattern of decentralized management dependent of these global oligarchies. Wealth moves from one to another according to the will of the interest of such oligarchies. From all the cities subject to this global order, the city of Roulettenburg, a living standard of the regime, always stands out. Or at least thats what its citizens have been told...
Located on the shores of the Crystal Sea and at the foot of the Victoria Mountains, Roulettenburg becomes an idyllic and privileged location for those who are worthy to live under the protection of its walls and wealth. Where once were historical hollowed buildings, now stands the magnificence of the ministries with their endless activity and infinite yearning of service. Unattainable places for many that after that greatness, populate the lower suburbs where hardly reaches the sunlight.
This monumental metropolis has been divided into districts, splitting the different castes that inhabit it and reducing the contact with each other to its minimal expression. The regime has guaranteed an everlasting system, where comparison, empathy or envy has been replaced by an imperious sense of aspiration and escalation towards privilege. A privilege that many will never reach.
The system designer, the destructiveness of the mind when it loses its rationality, when it loses its humanity, and all what is left is an instinct for survival. Eternal life, eternal happiness, eradication of pain, of fear, the alien, the unknown. Through language, act and thought. This is what has no name but a few call “the regime”.
The regime controls Roulettenburg relentlessly. Its ministries were formed to attend the society demands and form a new order. Ministry of Harmony, Ministry of Labor, Ministry of Plenty, Ministry of Peace and ultimately, Ministry of Truth. Pride of the so called homeland and tools for vigilance and control.
The Kommissars are in between the higher authorities among those ministries. Of them is the honor, duty and responsibility, to be an example and to obey the directives that are entrusted to them.
The Dissidence
Dissent exist from the privileged districts inhabited by the most select caste, to the suburbs crowded by the most unfortunate. Being dissident implies having an alternative vision or going beyond and defy what is established by the regime, either by questioning or disobeying, no matter how justified the motives may seem.
Most citizens have some sort of disagreement with the ideas or ways of the regime, but no one dares to confront it. Of course, the regime is aware that this level of dissent exists and to prevent any kind of organised movements or uprising, the Ministry of Truth took matters into its own hands and designed and strict program of neo-language called “Lingvo” along with a large compendium of obedience laws.
Project origin
The first version of Kommissar was an experimental concept developed during November 2015 #1GAM jam.
We originally intend to experiment with game mechanics which we consider emerging as the simulation of lifestyles, beyond the exciting realism of game, as for example, action, racing or simulation.
In our case, we wanted to go one step further while placing the player in the skin of a character who lives between duty and morals.
We think that games can transcends entertainment and send us a clear message through many immersive mechanics.
Our intention has always been to get outside the box and try to offer a different experience to the player. To transmit our thoughts.
We are, of course, great fans of Orwell’s works on the Spanish Civil War, Animal Farm, or 1984, and made no mention at it would mean a crime for us!
Kommissar was an incredible an exciting challenge, we had a warm welcome and fantastic feedback from the Gamejolt community. Thanks to them we decided to push forward on the whole concept development.
What we want to show
With Kommissar we want to make an exercise of consideration and rethink on some political, social and human aspects through the game. We want to address the “Banality of Evil” as Hannah Arendt label that human behaviour of obey orders regardless of their moral value. This was dealt in extend on the Milgram experiment, carried out in the 60s, on the behavior of obedience.
We want to focus a level of criticism towards totalitarian regimes and their reflexes in contemporary life through social strata, the welfare state and the culture of fear. Emphasizing that history can be repeated through the same reasoning if mankind does not create awareness about their actions and repercussions, from their way of life to their political and moral inclinations.
We think that this consideration is carried out more explicitly embodying the role of Judge as “regulating element”, instead as the common rebel role that has been always incarnated by the player or hero in similar contexts.
One of our motivations is to denounce the state bureaucracy, and the way it's cold and gray language, hides harshness through apparently innocent technicalities. Of course, one of our main objectives is to consider video games not only as entertainment but as a first-rate communicative tool, from which conscience, activism and critical thinking can emerge more freely than by other means.
How we want to show it
We are aware that giving more importance to the clarity or intensity of a message that to the vehicle itself is a failure under normal conditions.
Our goal is to make Kommissar a complete game, which can be enjoyed as a story and a as game regardless of the intentions or messages sent to the player. By creating an interesting and enjoyable experience, whether or not you have a reflective background.
All the mechanics included in the game have a purpose, as they are designed to make the player fit into the skin of the Kommissar character through the tasks that he performs. The player will be shown a set of rules to adhere by the game, and perform his work as an authority, studying his movements and adapting to each case that is presented to him.
Players will constantly receive orders from a superior control and, as the game becomes more complex, will discover that there are many alternative ways to fulfill their tasks, and advance through the cases and the history of the game. Initially the game will persuade them to follow orders and perform their duty as an efficient and neat employee, but increasingly will arise options that will tempt the player to awaken his judgment and question his actions. The game will give the choice to assume certain responsibilities and consequences or to defy the established order.
The superior command will give orders and ask the Kommissar to talk for his actions. The orders and documents received can be blindly accepted or examined and analyzed to prove their veracity or origin. The game will raise a series of rules, and the player will have to see how he conforms to them, whether he obeys them or not.
We intend to show through a work of management, in essence repetitive, like the one on any administrative or civil sector, lies no simple matter, as in each role and in each number, lies the life or and destiny of one or more people. Making an act of pondering over the dilemma between the technical and the human.
Our constant references, which we make both explicitly and implicitly, have to do with the conceptual influence we believe certain authors have on the subject, and our personal homage to them. Their timeless vision has developed the imaginaries we currently always associate almost unconsciously to the issues we address in Kommissar.
Anyone who knows them can see those references to a lesser or greater extent. Metropolis and the Tower of Babel, the eternal and greatest enemy of the Big Brother "Goldstein", Papers please and the bureaucracy as a concept that goes beyond the alienation of the individual in pursuit of the task entrusted to him, and the struggle of the human being to fit in the society, from personal relations to mere survival.
The message obviously depends on each individual and the prism through he observes its reality. As in all works of art, we consider that each person will draw a different message and that is one of the main interests of this project.
This game after all is a small manifesto told through the acts of the "enemy" rather than those of the protagonist. Just as in society, evolved or not, all global actors of change, such as change itself, produce fear and rejection.
If we are not willing to embrace change, we will simply postpone the inevitable.
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