The Royal Shakespeare Company is working on its first-ever video game, an adaptation of Macbeth – but it doesn’t play out as you’d expect.
The game, a collaboration with developer iNK Stories,is called Lili and is set in contemporary Iran. Here, the title character is inspired by Lady Macbeth and played by Cannes Best Actress winner Zar Amir.
As such, iNK Stories is describing the game as a neo-noir “screen-life thriller”, combining live-action and interactive storytelling, and is influenced by Amir’s experiences as an Iranian woman in exile battling authoritarian gendered oppression.
“We’re really calling this genre a ‘screen-life thriller’, with the idea that all of this is transpiring on your desktop,” iNK Stories co-founder Navid Khonsari tells Eurogamer. “The real focus for that is we want to embrace a large audience, people that naturally might not see themselves as wanting to play games.”