Nobody Knows For Certain

Whether this happened a long time ago  or not so long ago, Whether this really happened, or not Nobody Knows For Certain...

Set against the backdrop of illustrated children’s books from the Soviet era that were abundant in India in a series of local languages during the Cold War years, this interactive quest is a journey through a world where the act of storytelling is both playful and dangerous, a site of control and subversion.

Using fiction, documentary and fantasy to move back and forth between the USSR and India through different moments in the 20th century that have been featured in these children books, this interactive narrative explores the radical reframing of social order, the evolution of archetypes, the individual within the collective, the dance between fantasy and industry, the allure of the promised land and how stories carry forward, leak, morph and change themselves, the world and its people in a way that nobody knows for certain.

It is imagined in the form of a mycelium of interconnected stories and speculations taking off from archival material while simultaneously serving as an archival architecture to host a selection of the original children’s books, their illustrations and associated worlds.

Using interactive multimedia, video, illustrated book-form, comics, written text, archival images, original artwork and sound… the form of the work lies between the language of interactive fiction, multimedia encyclopedic CD-roms, quest games and narrative game play. 

Downloadable on PC (both MAC & Windows), readers can mine hidden books as they move through the work, building their own collection of the original stories. To proceed in the journey involves a quest for a portal between one tale and the next. Certain moments offer a pause and the opportunity to explore archival findings and historical backdrops often linking these two seemingly disparate nations that were closely tied to one another. 

This game, much like any book, is not meant to be consumed in one sitting and can be revisited with all progress saved for the next time round.

Research, Script, Animation and Art: Afrah Shafiq
Lead Programmer: Kushal Neil
Lead Animator: Piyush Verma
Additional Animation: Eeshani Mitra
Original Score and Music Production: Rushad Mistry and Zohran Miranda
Sound Design and Game Audio Implementation: Horacio Valdiveso
Project curators: Iaroslav Volovod and Valentin Diaconov
Garage Field Research team: Oxana Polyakova, Daria Bobrenko and Ivan Yarygin

This project was created with the support of the Garage Field Research program of Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow) for the Garage Digital platform.