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The Night Call devs are swapping taxis for tech-fuelled gas stations in their new narrative management gameFlat Eye is a “chilled” mash-up of Black Mirror meets Theme Hospital
Flat Eye is a “chilled” mash-up of Black Mirror meets Theme Hospital
“We really wanted to find an interesting mix ofmanagementand narrative in the gameplay,” Jauneaud tells me. “Our main inspirations were, of course, games likeTheme HospitalandDungeon Keeper. We also wanted to make something that had a bit more, let’s say, meaningful story to tell, like we did with Night Call, to share with players slices of life and have them meet characters that they’d never heard about. It’s really important that our games are about meeting people you wouldn’t in real life. So that’s what we wanted to do with the service station. It’s a place where people stop whether they’re rich or poor, sometimes even if they don’t have a car, they will stop there, and for us it was the perfect setting for the game.”
Flat Eye Management Gameplay TrailerWatch on YouTube
Flat Eye Management Gameplay Trailer
Indeed, no sooner have these words left Jaunaeud’s mouth than Victorino, who’s on game playing duties during my remote demo session, runs out of money. “Are we going to lose this game now?” Jauneaud asks. “Just after I said it was un-losable?”
There’s a similarly laidback approach to the game’s end-of-day graphs and stats. They’re there because “it wouldn’t be a management game without it,” Jauneaud tells me, but they don’t have any real bearing on your ‘success’ as a station clerk. After all, it’s the AI who’s the real brains of the outfit here. You’re just “an ant” and “a little cog in a large machine,” Jauneaud says, so it makes sense that you’re not directly responsible for the station’s financial wellbeing.
As my demo session goes on, though, it becomes increasingly clear that the removal of any kind of fail state isn’t just about catering to different difficulty levels. It also speaks to a wider pre-occupation with corporate structures and responsibilities, and the ease with which technology can both improve our lives and, inevitably, run away from us. Indeed, as you gain access to more advanced modules in Flat Eye’s tech tree, you’ll start to encounter named characters who you’ll be able to have Night Call-style dialogues with. These tech-focused conversations take place in a special, dedicated environment known as The Bubble, where store operations are suspended for a time so you can focus on the dialogue. You don’t control the clerk directly in these situations, Jauneaud tells me - you’re merely suggesting what they might say to these “premium customers” - but the way you conduct the conversation will change what each character thinks of the technology module they’re attempting to propose, and whether they’d like to go through with their respective procedures.
To illustrate this point, there was a character called Hal in my demo who wanted our clerk to offer a machine that eradicates signs of ageing. In the final game, we would have spoken to Hal several times before this point, much like how Night Call’s taxi stories played out over multiple pick-ups, and choices we made in previous conversations will have a bearing on how these final encounters play out. However, while Hal puts forward a good argument, our guiding AI isn’t best pleased. Indeed, she’s worried that allowing this machine to be created now will effectively put humanity on a path where the elite have access to eternal life, and after a lot of thoughtful discussion weighing up the pros and cons, she decides to nip this future in the bud before it gets out of hand.
Most of the premium customer conversations you’ll have in Flat Eye will end in a similar fashion, Jauneaud tells me, but eventually you’ll find a few where you’ll really have to decide whether you want to pursue it or not.
“We want to make sure that people don’t have to restart the game every time they reach an ending, so we have what we call outcomes, which are futures that the AI is able to predict right away and say, ‘This is not the right way, I know this is not a viable future, so I’m going to cancel it,’” he continues. “As you progress through the game, you will unlock technologies and modules and meet customers that will offer you actual, potential, viable futures, and we have between three and five [out of around 20 possible outcomes] that are going to be for the player to choose whether they want to live in a certain kind of future. Those are like end-game endings.”
Jauneaud and Victorino expect it will take around ten hours before you encounter one of these endings, but they say the team have been careful to make sure that “technology is not shown in the game as good or bad,” which will hopefully avoid obvious,Black Mirror-style pitfalls we’ll be able to spot from a mile away. “It’s really how people use it,” Jauneaud adds, citing Black Mirror as a reference, but also emphasizing that they “wanted to show you can also have wholesome, nice, interesting stories using technology” that aren’t always “very negative”.
Flat Eye Date Reveal TrailerWatch on YouTube
Flat Eye Date Reveal Trailer
“I think the goal for me and the team is to tell the story about how we get to the utopia we are all praying for,” he says. “To get there, we have to make sacrifices, we have to test stuff, we have to fail and we have to succeed. It’s not going to happen in one day, and to me the whole game is about that. It’s about how we have options and we’ve got to pick the right one and how are we going to do it. Personally, I feel like technology is seen as a saviour for a lot of people and it’s a big, big mistake. Technology is not going to save us. It’s really how we are managing technology and how we are using it.”
Indeed, a lot of the tech modules you’ll find in Flat Eye are “based on actual technologies, or technologies that exist in a certain way,” says Jauneaud. The dawn of our second day unlocks the SurgeryLife machine, for example, which, as the name implies, allows customers to undergo complex operations in the blink of an eye. There’s also the FutureLife machine, where customers can get predictions on how to handle the rest of their day.
One of these problematic elements is the game’s inclusion of “suicide booths”. When Monkey Moon first started work on the game in 2019 after finishing Night Call, it was a concept that was “in discussion in some countries where they have assisted deaths,” Jauneaud tells me, but time has since caught up with them. “Right now, in Switzerland, a couple of months ago, they built an actual suicide booth, and we really need to hurry up, or we’re going to look old.”
“Honestly, this is my view, this is probably not the game’s view, [but] we live in an age where technology is moving whether we want it to or not,” says Jauneaud. “Do I want a guy to build a tunnel under Los Angeles? Probably not, but I’m not going to do anything about it. So I think those topics have to be discussed, they have to be part of the discussion, otherwise technology is going to overcome us. Technology is going to win without our input. As a French person, I think it should be normal. Probably not in a service station, obviously, but you will see in the game, you cannot just come to the module and get in it and die. That’s not how it works, you have to go through a process, [and] we address these issues in the game.”
In fact, there’s another rival company in the game called Hibiscus “who are jealous of what Eye Life is doing,” says Victorino. “You’re going to have a lot of characters and customers complaining about the hegemony of Eye Life and all these technologies, but also competitors trying to sabotage what the company is doing. You’re in the middle of that.”
Fortunately, your “very pragmatic” AI does genuinely seem to be on the side of humanity rather than the Flat Eye corporate overlords, and I’m intrigued to see how, as Jauneaud puts it, she “[tries] to understand the world and better understand humans and why humans are so dumb and inefficient at what they’re doing” – all while they’re trying to actively destroy her.
“I hope people at the end of the game, when we try to explain what we’re trying to do and how we think about technology that, it’s a good thing, if it’s used properly. And it goes with the example that we’ve seen, with this character asking to live forever. Yeah, technology will probably offer that at some point, but is it a good idea? Should we do it just because we should? That’s the main topic of the game.”
