Random access memories: Inside the time-shifting narrative of The Wreck – Discover

The Wreck is filed under games, but it’s also been called a visual novel, an interactive experience, and a playable movie. Florent Maurin is OK with all of it. “I like to think we’re humbly participating in expanding the idea of what a video game can be,” he says.

Maurin is the co-writer, designer, and producer of The Wreck — and here we’ll let you decide what to call it. The Wreck tells the tale of Junon, a writer who’s abruptly called to a hospital to make a life-changing decision involving her mother. The story is anchored by the accident that lends the game its name, but the ensuing narrative is splintered, and begins to take shape only as players navigate through seemingly disconnected scenes that can be viewed multiple times from different perspectives. The Wreck is far from light. But its powerful story and unorthodox mechanics combine for a unique experience.

“We tried to make a game that’s a bit off the beaten path,” says Maurin, who’s also the president and CEO of The Pixel Hunt studio, “and hopefully it connects with people.”

ADA FACT SHEET

The Wreck

• Winner: Social impact
• Team: The Pixel Hunt
• Available on: iPhone, iPad
• Team size: 4

Maurin is a former children’s journalist who worked at magazines and newspapers in his native France. After nearly 10 years in the field, he pivoted to video games, seeing them as a different way to share real stories about real people. “Reality is a source of inspiration in movies, novels, and comic books, but it’s almost completely absent in the gaming landscape,” he says. “We wanted to challenge that.”

Founded in 2014, The Pixel Hunt has released acclaimed titles like the App Store Award–winning historical adventure Inua and the text-message adventure Bury Me, My Love. It was near the end of the development process for the latter that Maurin and his daughter were involved in a serious car accident.

“It was honestly like a movie trope,” he says. “Time slowed down. Weird memories that had nothing to do with the moment flashed before my eyes. Later I read that the brain parses through old memories to find relevant knowledge for facing that kind of situation. It was so sudden and so intense, and I knew I wanted to make something of it. And what immediately came to mind was a game.”

Junon’s interactions with the hospital staff drive the narrative in The Wreck.

But Maurin was too close to the source material; the accident had left a lasting impact, and he separated himself from the creative process. “I think I was trying to protect myself from the intensity of that feeling,” he says. “That’s when Alex, our art director, told me, ‘Look, this is your idea, and I don’t think it’ll bloom if you don’t really dig deep and own the creative direction.’ And he was right.”

That was art director Alexandre Grilletta, who helmed the development team alongside lead developer Horace Ribout, animator Peggy Lecouvey, sound designers Luis and Rafael Torres, and Maurin’s sister, Coralie, who served as a “second brain” during writing. (In a nice bit of serendipity, the game’s script was written in an open-source scripting language developed by Inkle, which used it for their own Apple Design Award-winning game, Overboard, in 2022.)

Junon’s sister might not be an entirely welcome presence in The Wreck.

The story of The Wreck is split into two parts. The first — what the team calls the “last day” — follows Junon at the hospital while she faces her mother’s situation as well as revealing interactions with her sister and ex-husband. Maurin says the “last day” was pretty straightforward from a design standpoint. “We knew we wanted a cinematic look,” he says, “so we made it look like a storyboard with some stop-motion animation and framing. It was really nothing too fancy. The part that was way more challenging was the memories.”

Those “memories” — and the backstory they tell — employ a clever mechanism in which players view a scene as a movie and have the ability to fast-forward or rewind the scene. These memory scenes feel much different; they’re dreamlike and inventive, with swooping camera angles, shifting perspectives, and words that float in the air. “I saw that first in What Remains of Edith Finch,” says Maurin. “I thought it was an elegant way of suggesting the thing that triggers a character’s brain in that moment.”

Junon’s thoughts are often conveyed in floating phrases that surround her in stressful moments.

Successive viewings of these memories can reveal new details or cast doubt on their legitimacy — something Maurin wrote from experience. “I’ll give you an example,” he says. “When my parents brought my baby sister home from the hospital, I remember the exact moment they arrived in the car. It’s incredibly vivid. But the weird part is: This memory is in the third person. I see myself tiptoeing to the window to watch them in the street — which is impossible! I rewrote my own memory for some reason, and only my brain knows why it works like that. But it feels so real.”

Throughout the development process, Maurin and team held close to the idea of a “moving and mature” story. In fact, early prototypes of The Wreck were more gamified — in one version, players grabbed floating items — but playtesters found the activity distracting. “It took them out of the story,” Maurin says. “It broke the immersion. And that was counterproductive to our goal.”

Items in The Wreck — like this tin of peppermints — often carry a larger meaning.

Maurin admits that approaching games with this mindset can be a challenge. “Some players are curious about our games and absolutely love them. Some people think, ‘These don’t fit the perception of what I think I enjoy.’ And maybe the games are for them, and maybe they’re not. But this is what we’ve been doing for 11 years. And I think we’re getting better at it.”

Meet the 2024 Apple Design Award winners

Behind the Design is a series that explores design practices and philosophies from finalists and winners of the Apple Design Awards. In each story, we go behind the screens with the developers and designers of these award-winning apps and games to discover how they brought their remarkable creations to life.