Civil Sickness

Benjamin Jackson and Silvia Askanase

Civil Sickness

Silvia and Ben

Explore the world of Civil Sickness in the all-new mystery platformer. Enter the house and run from room to room gathering food, avoiding rat traps, and jumping from platforms and shelves. Meet friends and foes along the way, gathering information about the world surrounding you.  

By playing through the game you discover that the sickness of the house is stemming from you. The allegory is between human - caused air pollution and a fabricated pandemic/ plague that is infecting humans in the area. The rat is the equivalent of real-world CEOs and owners who perpetrate and allow for pollution of the environment to continue. The game also shows the predicament of how the production of many necessary products creates pollution by having the rat bring food that it is finding in the home back to its nest for its family. Its children's survival depends on the food but at the same time, it hurts the humans living in their house, depleting the food, and eventually leading to everyone's death. The game shows how precarious a situation the production of resources is but still how much it needs to be fixed because of the pollution being caused.

Within the actual game, while playing as the rat you see a human in one of the first few rooms but after going deeper into the house you discover a dead man who died due to the disease the rat carries. The player can also find a somewhat secret room in which a dog sticks its head through the wall and tells you more about the world. In the potential final version of the game, there is an option the leave the area in which the house is located, saving the humans and stopping the disease, or in the case of the allegory air pollution.


Game: https://simmer.io/@Silv/civil-sickness