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Elsinore, named after Elsinore Castle, is a 2019 point-and-click adventure game developed by Golden Glitch for PC. The game is based on William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the action of the plot. Along with the characters of that play, other characters like Peter Quince from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Othello.
Developed over seven years, Elsinore came out to favourable reviews, acclaim, numerous nominations. The game’s retelling of Hamlet is imbued with a refreshing take on the beloved canon. Elsinore’s uniqueness lies further in the mechanics of a time loop and multiple possible endings depending upon the choices taken by the players.
The tragedy of Hamlet
The play was written by William Shakespeare between 1599 and 1601 and is one of his most famous and performed plays. The play is Shakespeare’s longest work and is considered among the most powerful and influential works of world literature.
It depicts the actions of Prince Hamlet as he tries to come to terms with the death of his father and the subsequent marriage of his Uncle Claudius, who became King, with his mother, Gertrude. The ghost tells the Prince of his dead father that Claudius murdered the erstwhile King by poisoning him.
Much of the play deals with Hamlet’s mourning of his father and his inability to take any meaningful actions to avenge. Hamlet is stuck in an indecisive limbo from which he is unable to get out. During the play, he is directly or indirectly responsible for others’ deaths.
The play finally ends with the stage being littered with the dead bodies of nearly all the play's major characters.
Hamlet and Laertes, brother of Hamlet’s love interest Ophelia, are engaged in a duel because the latter believes Hamlet is why his sister died. Laertes slashes Hamlet with a poisoned blade. Hamlet then switches blade with Laertes and cuts him with the same blade.
Gertrude dies by drinking the poisoned wine that Claudius had kept for Hamlet. Upon being told of Claudius’ plan of killing Hamet by Laertes, Hamlet lunges at Claudius and kills him before succumbing to the poisoned wound. In the end, only Horatio, a close confidante of Hamlet, is left.
The story was based on the Scandinavian legend of Amleth. It is generally accepted that the skeleton plot is from an earlier play called Ur-Hamlet. Shakespeare was responsible for making the different sources into the compelling tragedy of death and mourning that still reverberates across time and space.
As the Arden edition of Hamlet comments, the play's story is capable of “seemingly endless retelling and adaptation by others.”
The world of Elsinore
Golden Glitch’s 2019 game Elsinore is among the numerous works that have reimagined the Bard and his plays in different contexts, eras and mediums. Other than it being a game, what sets Elsinore apart is how the creators negotiated with the medieval text.
Much like any stage production of the text, Elsinore is made up of various paratexts and mechanics equivalent to the props and mise-en-scène on a stage. The castle's design echoes that of Kronborg, the castle upon which Elsinore is based in Hamlet.
The visuals are meticulously laid into both colourful and era-appropriate while reflecting on particular scenes from Shakespeare’s play. The castle is fleshed out with rooms and events happening that players can interact with.
Ophelia
Most characters from the original play feature in the narrative of the game. The first significant change in the game text that the reader/player of the game will face is that the protagonist of the play is not the Prince but Ophelia.
The game's prologue begins with Laertes leaving for Paris and Hamlet being ordered to stay back after Ophelia’s first death. Thus each loop begins with Hamlet ranting in Ophelia’s room. Ophelia tells her father Polonius this particular incident in Act II in the original text.
She is stuck in a time loop, a cycle of four days unless she dies before that after she already had a nightmare witnessing the death of everyone as had happened in the actual text of Shakespeare. As in playing the text as Ophelia, this shift in perspective is foremost a counterfactual practice that the game introduces for the player in its adaptation.
As Erwin Panofsky states, in theatre, the relation of the representation on the stage to the audience or the beholder is static. In films, the spectator identifies with the lens of the camera and thus is afforded movement.
In video games, because the player has to play and be involved in this act of immersion. The players identify themselves with the protagonist. The player becomes Ophelia here and writes and performs their narrative with the play.
In the original text, Ophelia is a woman without any agency or choice who faces loss and ridicule to an extent where she is pushed towards insanity and is given an off-scene death by being drowned. Her presence and absence through death thereafter play an important role in the play's narrative, but she is left at the margins of the text. That is altered in the game.
Stuck in this repetitive nature of the time-loop, Ophelia manipulates the play's events to prevent the other characters' death. The gameplay provides the player with no branches of dialogue but the option to share information that Ophelia has learned from conversing with others or knowledge she had gathered in her previous time loop.
The primary importance of the medium of video games lies in the fact that it affords an agency, however limited, that is neither imagined nor possible in any other form of storytelling.
Janet Murray, in her 1997 book Hamlet on the Holodeck, describes this agency as:
“The satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices.”
Ophelia is afforded this agency, which she did not have in the canon. In Elsinore, she, and through her, the player can create their narrative.
Conversations with other characters can lead to trivial, yet indirectly consequential, tasks. Examples of such tasks are procuring art supplies for a character one is trying to befriend or telling people about a character’s fake death because that character asked the player to do so. Another example is learning of Claudius’s murder of King Hamlet, or the spy that plagues the Elsinore castle and kills Ophelia unless stopped.
The game thus introduces this freedom of choice to the character of Ophelia. Therefore, the player experiences the world of Hamlet and its meaning-making process. The presence of multiple endings, thirteen to be exact, defers the idea of an absolute meaning of the text set by the author. In one, Ophelia marries Claudius and becomes the Queen.
Meaning is created in each narrative by the player participating in the playtext. The audience becomes active participants. The time loop is an analogy to the stasis and indeterminacy that pervade the actual text. Shakespeare's Hamlet is overwhelmed with inaction.
Exploring the margins in Elsinore’s characters
In all the ways that Elsinore explores the possibilities in the canon, the game still preserves the timeline of the play. If the player does nothing, the text will play out as it has in Shakespeare’s text with each event happening one after the other.
The creators took the creative liberty to flesh out other characters, the history of past monarchs in the Hamlet family, and introduce nuances into the already present characters.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are women, not men, and are lovers. The former enjoys pranks and is cheerful, whereas the latter is of a serious tone and scolds the former.
Ophelia and Laertes are people of colour due to their mother being of Moorish descent and are subjected to racial discrimination in the game. That is a welcome shift from the usual whitewashing in media representation of that period.
A homosexual relationship between Horatio and Hamlet is hinted at quite early in the game when the player asks various characters about their friendship.
There is also the presence of a genderqueer character. Bernardo, an officer in the original text and the chief of the castle guards here, becomes Katherine for a play in the village.
Bernardo’s reply, when Ophelia recognizes Katherine as Bernardo, also shines a light on the actors who performed the woman characters in Shakespeare’s time:
Bernardo – “ For many years, I’ve been a player. It started when I was a child, playing Juliet. And tonight it ended, as Katherine.”
Ophelia – “Why must it end?”
Bernardo – “For a boy player, there are only two options when one grows old: Take the male parts, or leave the stage. And I would rather leave. I never thought the day would come when I would have to stop. I never wanted to. In the moments when I was up there… I felt… like I was showing the world the truer form of myself. The ‘me’ who was not just strong, but beautiful.”
Elsinore thus introduces marginalized narratives and characters into the political world of Hamlet. One of the developers, Kate Chironis, in talking about the game, and the idea of it not being historically correct, states they heavily researched the diversity of 16th century Denmark.
Based on that research, they provided each character in Elsinore with a deep and individualized history which she commented on as:
“A multitude of races and ethnicities, economic backgrounds, gender identities, sexual identities, and personalities.”
Concluding thoughts
Through its eponymous protagonist, Shakespeare's Hamlet meditates on the inner workings of the character’s psyche as it mourns, contemplates, and deals with an existential crisis. The resulting limbo binds him into paralysis. The reader, or the audience, sees Hamlet struggle to commit to an action.
In Elsinore, anguish and dilemma are portrayed through several well-woven characters. The inclusion of diversity and a focus on the history of those characters showcase their struggles living within Elsinore. The multiple endings of the game that a player can end with provide a ludic opportunity to make their narrative.
The choice of Ophelia as protagonist marks a shift in the male(-dominated) gaze of the Elizabethan tragedy to the perspective of the outsider Ophelia, who is further marginalized by her race.
She is invested with the power to act and to do so to prevent the original text’s ending from coming to fruition. Ophelia’s, and thus the player’s, action dictates the course of the play, whereas Hamlet fails to meaningfully act until it’s too late in both texts.
The rhizomatic possibilities that pervade the medieval space of Elsinore nuances the Shakespearean representation of characters. The game world is populated with marginalised identities instilled with voice and agency. The game’s introduction of diversity enriches the text.
The characters' introduction, the attempt at queering the text and pluralising the voices explore the possibilities of portraying them in contemporary approaches to medievality. In this, Elsinore becomes a unique retelling of Hamlet.
