Designing Wednesdays - Part 2
Welcome back to Designing Wednesdays!
In Part 1 of this series, I told you about the main angle of Wednesdays and especially how you don’t play as Timothee, the victim, but as his family, friends, lovers…
Well…
I lied.
Kind of.
There are moments in Wednesdays where you do play as Timothée. And that’s when you’re in Orco Park.
Part 2: The Park
Orco Park is a fictional theme park management game from the 90s (it’s fully drawn by Nico Nowak and you should definitely check her work).
You build rides, decorations, try to make visitors happy, collect shells that allow you to build more rides, more decorations, and so on.
Of course, while Orco Park is a management game, Wednesdays isn’t, and this fictional video game is mostly there for another purpose: unlocking memories.
As Orco, the mascot and advisor from Orco Park puts it:
When you go through a traumatic experience, it’s not unusual for your brain to hide these memories from you. They are not erased, but kept in a dark corner behind a glass that says “Break in case of random trigger”.
This is especially true for experiences of child sexual abuse, and a lot of victims have reported memories coming back years, sometimes decades later.
This memory recovery is fragmented, chaotic, chronologically twisted, and that’s what I wanted Wednesdays to feel like. Timothée’s fragments of memories are unlocked in various order, depending on how the player chooses to build their park, each ride acting as some kind of trigger. And that’s up to the player to make some sense of all of this.
Of course, some memories are more difficult than others, and this is the other main function of Orco Park: allowing the player to unwind between two scenes. You can adorn your park with decorations, clean the beaches, collect shells, chat with visitors, do some bird watching… While Orco Park isn’t a ~real~ management game, we made sure there is a lot of stuff to do to keep you busy when - if- you need it.
So… to sum it all up: in Wednesdays, you play as Tim, playing Orco Park, unlocking some of his memories, in which you play as anyone but Tim.
You might find it a bit weird, but I’m making a video game about child sexual abuse and you seem interested by it since you’re reading this, so maybe we’re both a little bit weird?
Weird is cool.
Ok Ok. We covered what the park is for. But that doesn’t explain why it’s here. Why is there a park management game within Wednesdays ?
I won’t get into much details, but back in 2020, during lockdown, I wrote a little text game called “My first video game”. It told the story of a kid whose first video game was a well known park management game from the 90s, played at his older cousin’s house. And as you probably expect: the story wasn’t about the park management game.
I won’t link to this game because it’s not very good and came from a whole different place from where I am now. But you should be able to find it if you’re really motivated.
After I put this game online, some people wrote to me. Not many, but their messages were quite moving. And I thought that maybe this was something worth exploring.
5 years later, Wednesdays is some kind of sequel to that game, and that’s why the park is still there.
Orco’s new, though. And he’s really eager to meet you!
If you enjoyed this newsletter, tell your friends about it! The newsletter they missed can all be read via the archive.
We still don’t have a Steam page or anything like that (for complicated reason I might explain at some point) and social media are owned by nazis now, so this newsletter is very the best way to be informed of Wednesday’s release!