Behind the Hydra's Eyes: A green game about red flags

LEFT-FIELD is a series of reviews and essays on new and old independent games that have an experimental or narrative quality.

Behind the Hydra's Eyes interrogates a lot of themes in its short runtime, but one of these is greenwashing. It's a term used to describe when something with touted ecological value causes more problems than it solves. You see it often with consumer goods. Ever buy a 'sustainable' product that has green packaging and wonder if there's any truth to it? How would you know if it makes any difference buying a 'planet-friendly' shampoo with microplastics? That's greenwashing.

The player is Dave, a new project lead of Forward Green, an English non-Government organisation planning and developing a new wind farm in Mexico. Joining the project to 'make a real impact', the player is onboarded into the office, meeting their coworkers Alex and Jen. Everyone is united to serve a clearly good purpose: develop clean energy infrastructure, support communities in other countries, and make sure the finances work out. It can't be that complicated, right?

The game simulates the humdrum of office work, with an all-too-real mechanic of mashing the keyboard to field email responses. There's also some mechanics to flesh out the business simulation aspect of the game, with the work of the player generating quarterly income statements against rent and bills, with adjustable contributions to the player's lifestyle and total savings. Later, the player can adjust the marketing budget, balancing whether they want to trade off media campaigns and buy off advocates or undertake token social impact activities. These features aren't particularly developed in practice, but aid the narrative that the success of the project has, in turn, material consequences for the player and the company.

Of course, the project soon reveals itself to be much more fraught than expected. Each of the project's potential sites carries tangible and intangible costs: both for the company, locals, and Indigenous communities. Soon, the player is fielding concerned emails from left and right about the project. There's bureaucratic miseries over the project's improper management of an impact assessment, and increasingly polemic discord and protest, spurred by the fact Forward Green purchased lots from the Landlord Alliance, a group of investors privatising the local area en masse, at the cost of the communities who live there.

The game's secondary themes lie around a satire of office culture and the uncanny discomfort of working in a space in denial of its own problems. Despite the chirpy demeanour of Dave's colleagues, it's soon clear their idealism is completely useless and myopic. There's also quarterly meetings with the firm's boss, which also reveal themselves to be increasingly transactional and poorly suited to discuss the mounting and underlying problems behind the project as it crashes and burns.

Behind the Hydra's Eyes is a somewhat direct and cynical game, but expertly captures the way in which bureaucracies have a tendency to control and pacify complex problems such as climate change. An effective moment comes when the player is left alone, without a deluge of emails, and they're asked how they feel. Do you feel relief or guilt? The advocate as cog in the machine is left in a tug of war between their desire for meaningful change and keeping their head above the proverbial water. It works because we're all feeling a little bit like that right now.

The game is the work of A House on the Bailey, a two-person development team including artist and animator Adam James and programmer Dragos Farcas, with both involved in the concept and writing. It began life as a submission for the 2024 IndieCade Climate Jam, a jam on itch.io organised by Dargan Frierson. This year's jam provided the theme 'Change the Story', encouraging participants to explore untold or nuanced stories and themes around climate change.

An interesting innovation of the IndieCade Climate Jam was that it adopted a multi-stage 'sprint' approach to encourage participants to iterate their game from concept, prototype, production, and release over four weeks. This design has provided an unusually transparent and in-depth insight into the vision of its developers, with James and Farcas creating an early build of the game and publishing quite detailed development documents, including an artistic statement.

The developers explain in their artistic statement that the game's story is entirely about seeing the 'hydra', the many-headed systems of exploitation that intersect with and underlie complex problems such as climate change. These problems, they say, will not end simply by transposing capitalism to a green economy. They cite inspiration from several works, including This System is Killing Us, a book by researcher Xander Dunlap that engages similar themes around the tensions between the 'green economy', land management, and Indigenous land rights. Both works subvert thinking that the green economy is not without its own problems, inherent to the consumption required for a mass uplift of the global energy sector.

You can check out Behind the Hydra's Eyes on itch.io. The developers plan to expand the game in a post-jam version to a full release at a later date. Some of their goals include to expand the story, make the game more interactive and update the art. The IndieCade Climate Jam is in its submission period, with entries due by tomorrow 22 July.