The brutal psychological horror Town Of Light probably comes closest. Credit: Naughty DogĬuriously, there are not that many games that let us, though. Unchartered: The Nathan Drake Collection. Surely, now, it’s time for games to let us virtually experience a little UrbEx exploration, too? From Uncharted’s Nate Drake to Assassin’s Creed’s collective army of assassins, we’ve grown pretty accustomed to parkouring across our virtual playgrounds. The shimmying up the drainpipe part of UrbEx? Well, there’s a lot of that already. I know it shouldn’t – it’s just a convenient backdrop to a battle royale, and there is no story behind it, not really – but the broken fences and boarded-up doorways tell a tale all of their own, don’t they? As much as I love shooting stuff, a tiny, pathetic part of me yearns to forego the battle and just spend the match exploring the empty homes instead. PUBG’s Erangel map – purportedly a former Russian military testing facility that’s since been abandoned – intrigues me, too. Those tiny, almost inconsequential details can reveal so much when stacked together. Though both Arkane and Naughty Dog alike are exceptionally skilled at character-driven drama, they also let the world they’ve painted tell its own story, too. There’s something inherently enticing about a once-bustling building that’s since fallen into obscurity, and it’s why I’ve always been drawn to games that permit its world to tell its story – environmental storytelling, in other words.Īfter games like Silent Hill had sewn the seeds, it was Dishonored and The Last Of Us that lovingly watered and tended that curiosity.
Picking through the detritus in abandoned subway stations. The broken splendour of the Lakeview Hotel. The deserted corridors of Wood Side Apartments. They are always, without exception, fascinating to me. Sometimes the places are entirely empty sometimes there are still mildewy clothes sitting expectantly in the washing machine. Pop the term into YouTube, and you’ll be assaulted by thousands of videos from all across the world, people dressed up in black sweats and full-face masks as they sweep through long-forgotten French chateaus and vacant mansions on Billionaires Row. But my god, I thrive on living this life vicariously through those who are fitter, and braver, than I am, even if I do set an astonishingly low bar on both those counts.įor the uninitiated, UrbEx is a legally opaque pastime in which explorers enter but never break into (thus typically only breaching civil laws, not criminal ones) empty properties. I’ll be honest: even if we weren’t in the worst timeline amidst a deadly pandemic and forbidden from non-essential travel, I still reckon the odds of me shimmying up a drainpipe to sneak in via an open window are pretty fucking slim. I’ve even virtually tiptoed past unwitting security guards in a forgotten theme park and reached the peak of its rusted roller coaster. I’ve dropped by a sprawling English mansion in which every door has been broken down with force, each one now lying in splinters on the ground. I’ve visited deserted farmhouses where teacups sit on sink-side drainers. I’ve been to empty asylums still stocked with patient records and unsettling clinical equipment. I have left my home precisely one time since March 6, and yet somehow, via the magic of the internet, I’ve been all over the world exploring abandoned places. I found urban exploration – or UrbEx as the cool kids say, although I am not one of them – in lockdown. Photographs that once mattered enough to someone that they were slipped into ornate frames still languish on dusty mantle pieces and beside carefully made beds. Letters, clothes, bottles, toys, unpaid bills. More often than not, drawers and cupboards are upended and ripped open, their contents strewn all over the place. Ceilings have tumbled and smashed onto floors now, and stairs gape open into the shadowy basements below. Sometimes the decline is such that you can’t even see what a room once functioned as.
Sometimes you’ll see the sinewy tendrils of nature squeezing through the open cracks in the brickwork, trying to reclaim its land. The shot is accompanied by melancholic strings – there’s no end of depressing instrumentals pasted onto these sequences, it seems – as the camera lovingly caresses the dust, the decay, the decades of discarded decadence. The camera pans across the entryway, sweeping past the pile of unopened mail, over the shoes kicked off in the hallway, tilting upwards toward a domed ceiling mottled with mould and peeling paint.
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