The Indie Game Magazine April 2015 | Issue 48 | Page 15
Indie Game Magazine: The
Lost Pisces a reimagining of
Hans Christian Anderson’s
The Little Mermaid. What
makes this classic story
the perfect blueprint for
the narrative you’d like
to tell with Pisces?
Dan Rutkowski: Good
question. The original Little Mermaid is a
pretty fascinating short story that I’ve always
admired, because it’s a really “deep” story
that barely anyone is familiar with. The animated versions that were created didn’t do
the core message justice, unfortunately. That
said, the original tale was actually about the
Little Mermaid desperately searching for a
soul, and doing anything to gain one. Most
fairy tales don’t get into such complex matters as searching for a soul in order to evade
the infinite nothingness of a death without
one. That’s a pretty intense concept for a
children’s story. Andersen’s version existed
within a world where religious beliefs dictated
that, strictly speaking, only human beings
have souls. Animals, plants, etc. are alive
and conscious beings, but they don’t have
a soul that will allow them to continue on
after death… at least according to the story.
It takes place at the end of the last great
high-civilization (cough, Atlantis, cough) and
sees the world’s coastal regions (which today
hold roughly 44% of the world’s population)
being drowned under the seas as they slowly
rise and consume more and more land. With
their backs set against still-existing glaciers,
the civilization has to abandon its technological endeavors and go into a sort of survival
mode. Think about it: Scientists are no longer
focused on research… they’re focused on
feeding their families. That goes for every
profession. And when a civilization is dealing with starvation, flooding, infrastructure
collapse, power-vacuums, hysteria, and massive migrations, it doesn’t have the time or
manpower to maintain the knowledge it’s
gained over the eons… and so within only a
generation or so, those technological marvels
can be lost. Realistically, an advanced civilization can be sent into stone-age existence
very quickly.
Knowing that we wanted to play with AI quite
a bit, there’s this obvious sort of connection
to the question of “what is a soul?” It’s easy
enough for many people to imagine that
anything alive has some eternal essence, but
it’s difficult to imagine that something which
has never been alive can actually house a
soul. However, if one day we create AI that
is sophisticated enough to understand its
own existence, it’s a legitimate conclusion
that the AI would ask the same thing any
child eventually does: What happens to us
at “the end?” If we can build a machine that
can question its existence, it will almost certainly experience the same terrifying eternal
questions that any human being is faced
with. Our Little Mermaid’s name is Pisces,
and she’s faced with those same questions.
She’s endowed with enough consciousness
to become consumed by the same haunting
ideas as the Little Mermaid had, and she is So, in short, The Lost Piscestakes place during
driven to become human in order to gain this “fall” from grace. It’s a moment in time
where you’ll see beautiful monuments that
a soul.
stand as testaments to what civilization can
IGM: can you tell me about the game’s set- achieve, being lost to time and the oceans.
ting? It obviously differs fro H H