Inkubus

You’re a teenage girl, connected, clued-in, but what lurks in the deepest, darkest regions beyond the screen? 

A collaboration between writers/artists Andy Campbell and Christine Wilks, first released in 2013, this first-person coming-of-age story-game merges an interactive quiz with atmospheric graphics and 1st person exploration. 

With creeping awareness, a teenage girl/the player struggles with insidious gender stereotyping, where womanhood is rendered as malleable and polymorphic as a digital doll, that literally threatens to drain her of life. 

Initially the story-game progresses via skewed quizzes and leading questions, designed to manipulate and distort the girl’s/player’s behaviour. The game then switches to 3D where the player experiences a hunt through a visceral cave-tunnel system to confront the creature that embodies the damaging artificial feminine ideal.

The opening soundtrack was created by Chris Joseph.

Exhibited at the Electronic Literature Organisation’s ‘Hold the Light’ conference in 2014. 

Inkubus was also featured in DISCORPIA in April 2019 – an exhibition gathering artists and thinkers in visual art, design, contemporary dance, medical humanities, virtual reality, sound creation, computer science, and creative writing in order to question what it means not to know the limits of our bodies in the face of new technologies.

View the Inkubus Development Journal