Arcade Review: DARKFIELD’s Dystopian Game of Choice, Sound and Darkness

★★★★

DARKFIELD return with Arcade, an immersive installation that sits somewhere between theatre, gaming and an elaborate psychological experiment.

Inside an unassuming shipping container are rows of screenless arcade machines. Once seated, headphones on and lights gone, you are plunged into a dystopian world of gunfire, betrayal and increasingly uneasy choices. There is no screen to guide you and no visual landscape to fall back on. Instead, everything is built through sound, suggestion and your own imagination.

The concept is deceptively simple. Arcade becomes a choose-your-own-adventure played entirely in darkness, with questions answered and coins fed into slots to determine where the story takes you next. The tactile act of using the machine becomes strangely important when sight has been removed, and each decision feels far more consequential than it probably should.

What DARKFIELD do exceptionally well is manipulate space through binaural sound. Voices seem to whisper directly beside you, environments stretch far beyond the confines of the shipping container, and the world around you feels increasingly tangible despite never being seen. It is a remarkable reminder of how quickly the brain will construct an entire landscape from sound alone.

The branching structure is where Arcade becomes particularly impressive. This is my third time entering its darkness, and on every occasion I have been transported into a completely different adventure. It gives the choices genuine consequence and the experience considerable replayability, rather than simply offering the illusion of agency. Even on this visit, my companion and I emerged from the same shipping container having travelled through entirely different stories, immediately comparing where we had gone, what we had chosen and how our respective worlds had unravelled.

It is perhaps more experience than theatre, and emotionally it does not linger in quite the same way as DARKFIELD’s strongest narrative work. The story can occasionally feel secondary to the mechanics of the game itself, but those mechanics are so cleverly conceived that this does little to diminish the enjoyment.

Arcade is inventive, disorientating and technically superb, transforming a blacked-out shipping container into a fully realised dystopian universe. You may not be able to see the game, but DARKFIELD make sure you are completely inside it.

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Darkfield

Potterrow Plaza - Container 1 at Pleasance Dome

Various Times

Until 31st August

Tickets Here