Ib is designed to leverage this, with each piece of Guertena’s art from the opening of the game appearing variously as either moving, scary paintings or walking/shuffling enemies. Walking through the post-1950s section of any major art institute in the United States is, with the right lighting and music, indistinguishable from a haunted house. The effect of that, and this might a necessary simplification, is that Ib has to work a lot harder to be a scary game.īeing set in an art gallery enables Ib to be a horror game on face due to the nature of contemporary art. To begin with, it means that some general markers of contemporary indie horror games, like a first-person view and sound cues based on that, aren’t available to Ib. Ib is a horror game built in RPG Maker, which means that there are certain things afforded to the game. Then, at the end of the game, the narrative choices that you have made pay off in the form of a hierarchy of endings that go from “really nice” to “absolutely, incredibly sad.” The game moves along via narrative events and puzzles that facilitate the narrative, mostly in the classic adventure game model of “find something and take it to a place,” although this is occasionally interrupted by moving block puzzles.

The rest of the game is spent moving through a dreamlike world based on Guertena’s art. Ib wanders away from her parents and through the gallery, returning after she has viewed all the work in order to find that her parents have disappeared.

The exhibition is a retrospective on an artist named Guertena, whose work can best be described as a mashup of contemporary art, running the gamut of painting, sculpture, “outsider”-style modern art, and basically anything else you can think of.

Ib is a game about a young girl who goes to an art exhibition with her parents. This post is part of the Designing Horror series.

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