The Franz Kafka Videogame: Exploring Themes Across Mediums
The second game from indie developer Denis Galanin, The Franz Kafka Videogame innovatively takes inspiration from the works of Franz Kafka to create a unique point-and-click puzzle adventure game. Having read a few of Franz Kafka’s stories, the idea of a videogame based on Kafka’s brand of literature very quickly caught my interest. His writings mostly focus on magical realism and fantasy to explore themes of absurdity, alienation, existential anxiety, and guilt. Kafka was influenced highly by his father’s overbearing and creatively stifling upbringing, lifelong anxieties, and many more of his own experiences, so I wanted to see how someone would approach translating Kafkesque styles into the medium of a videogame. With puzzles that mess with reality and play with your mind, I think Galanin did an admirable job embodying the ideas and mindset of Kafka within The Franz Kafka Videogame.
For some background on the game’s development, Galanin specifies that the entire game was developed fully through improvisation. With the experience of using partial improvisation in his previous game, Hamlet, Galanin wanted to experiment by creating a game with total improvisation; in my opinion, Galanin’s development approach greatly contributed to the individuality of the puzzles and outlandish plot in The Franz Kafka Videogame. Improvisation gave Galanin the opportunity to build and update his puzzles as the ideas came to him and kept him from being restricted to following a game design document, a limitation he felt strongly bounded by when he worked for a game development company; this approach allowed for him to continually improve his puzzles and encouraged his creative process. Additionally, the plot could constantly be changed to better fit his puzzle ideas or better tie everything together into a complete narrative.
The way The Franz Kafka Videogame presents its puzzles has one major thing in common across the board: it offers players no guide or navigation. To better clarify what I mean by that, none of the puzzles really have any instruction that explains what needs to be solved. The puzzles are usually just the player dropped into a strange event and then left to their own devices to try and figure out what exactly is going on in this specific scene. In keeping with the manipulation of reality that a Kafka work would follow, the way the elements of the environment act with each other and in relation to a player’s expectation is everchanging; there isn’t really a clear sense of logic to follow.
For example, one section of the game has a tile slider puzzle. Instead of sliding the tiles to get the numbers into a Numpad sequence as you might expect, the actual pattern you’re supposed to match is another hidden aspect of the puzzle. At most, the puzzles have a vague, single-word hint that is included in either the dialogue or somewhere small in the environment. The way the guidewords are included makes it hard to tell when or where these hints are; therefore, the hints were not entirely helpful because of how difficult they were to find or recognize the importance of whenever they did appear.
Most of the puzzles were difficult to figure out, in the sense that you had no clue what they even wanted you to solve. For many of the puzzles, I had to wait out two timers, that would provide a hint when their time exhausted, just to keep progressing through the game. Quite often, trying to solve the puzzles consisted of me clicking randomly around the interface, hoping something I happened to interact with might advance the puzzle somehow. While challenging to deal with, this system does admirably encapsulate the feelings that Franz Kafka often delved into. The alienation, irritation, and confusion of the puzzles and how they’re set up parallels alike themes found in Kafka’s novels. When you can’t figure out how the world is supposed to work and are stuck doing nothing, puzzle after puzzle, your patience and desire to advance through the journey diminish. Similarly, Kafka typically had characters caught in unpleasant events that they couldn’t really free themselves from, so they’re forced to deal with their circumstances. This is similar to how the players of the game can get stuck waiting out various confusing puzzles that they cannot leave and are inevitably likely to get irritated with.
Although these puzzles can be extremely unclear and get annoying, I would still say they’re pretty clever. In the spirit of a creation inspired by Kafka, I should have assumed reality in this game would be unreliable and unlikely to follow the limitations of the real world. Given Kafka’s proficiency in magical realism, The Franz Kafka Videogame was bound to be a reality-altering experience that would treat the environment as a playground.
Although the game doesn’t follow the exact plot of any singular Kafka story, the game’s plot does use multiple characters and themes from Kafka’s works. The disapproved relationship between characters K and his fiancée Felice imitates the relationship of Georg and Freida in Kafka’s The Judgement; the name K is what the main character Josef K. goes by in The Trial. Georg and Freida’s relationship in The Judgement was written to directly parallel Kafka’s own relationship with Felice Bauer, to whom he engaged and broke off the engagement with twice, so the game even incorporates inspiration from Kafka’s own life.
Around three-fourths of the way through the game, the game introduces Gregor Zamza, a private detective who suddenly turned into a “hideous insect”. While he adjusts to this transformation with little fanfare in comparison to the character he originates from, Zamza is obviously derived from the character Gregor Samsa from Kafka’s most famous novel The Metamorphasis. Many of the direct references to Kafka and his prose are either visual or via character names, but the more complex themes are included using the puzzles, as I explained earlier.
Overall, the puzzles aren’t as straightforward or sensible as many puzzle-solvers may prefer, but the way it ties into Franz Kafka and his novels makes it especially worthwhile to play. Admittedly, I’m not a big fan of Kafka’s prose, but this game offers an exceptional experience that masterfully transfers the themes and emotions from stories written almost a century ago into a videogame. Especially if you’ve ever read anything by Kafka, The Franz Kafka Videogame offers a compelling stylization of Kafka’s most prominent themes that I think more people should experience.
