Lose Yourself in ‘The House of Cenci’ (The NoPro Review)
Parabolic Theatre combines text adventures and live performance for a fresh, innovative immersive experience
(Content warning: references to domestic violence, incest, murder, and rape/sexual assault.)
If you’ve never heard of the Cenci family before, a summary of their tragic tale may give you… some pause. This real life family from the late 1500s was dominated by a violent, abusive patriarch, Francesco Cenci. Count Francesco reportedly sexually assaulted his daughter Beatrice multiple times and also abused his wife and two sons. Despite the family reporting these crimes, he was freed from jail due to his wealth and status in the community. The rest of the family fearfully conspired to kill Count Francesco, attempting to make the death appear as an accident, but they were eventually arrested, found guilty, and sentenced to death. The rest of the family perished save for the youngest son, Bernardo, who was forced to watch the others being executed in public.
Countless artists and writers have been inspired by the story of the Cenci family, including but not limited to Shelley and Artaud. And now Parabolic Theatre has created their own twist on the tale, in a stunning, ambitious, cross-platform hybrid work that crosses interactive fiction with live online performance to become more than the sum of its parts.
The House of Cenci (co-created by Zoe Flint, Amy Strike, Chloe Mashiter, and Owen Kingston) combines both text adventure games and weekly episodic performances on Zoom. The interactive story is told in four acts, with content in the game alternating with three once a week Zoom sessions. The Zooms act as a gate between chapters so you must complete the next Zoom session in order to be able to progress to the next part of the text adventure. (I will note that the amount of time between Zoom sessions does give people enough time to play through the game at their leisure, so the artificial bottleneck works well here, especially if you’re unexpectedly busy for a few days.) The Zoom links for any particular act of the story are all hidden within the text adventure behind locked doors of the Cenci mansion, all of which can be opened by solving puzzles correctly.
While other online immersive productions have played with the notion of a custom web interface which links out to different Zoom rooms based upon the participant’s chosen path, this is the first instance that I’m aware of that uses such a strong narrative throughline to connect the web site to the Zooms and back and makes the web portion such an integral part of the experience, versus simply a visual hub which links out to Zoom URLs.
(Minor spoilers follow.)
The game component is centered around exploring the hallways of the sprawling, epic Cenci Mansion, which is full of hidden passages, secret rooms, and other mysteries. The game also has a mechanism allowing players to seamlessly switch between the same creepy, decrepit mansion in multiple timelines: 1599, 1971, and 2021. That’s right, we’ve got some good old fashioned time travel embedded in the story! Actions that you take in the past will affect the other timelines, allowing for intricate puzzles to be presented to the players. (Plus, underneath this all is an additional layer of story which explains why the house exists in multiple timelines and, well, why the adventure game part exists at all, but it’s not necessary to understand the meta-story to enjoy yourself here.)
Plunging participants into a creepy, evocative text adventure with an appropriately haunting soundtrack (by Michael Wray) grounds the overall experience in a way that makes the live Zoom interactions feel even more intense; plus, given the limited duration of time you get to spend with the live characters (only a single hour once a week), I found myself swallowed by anticipation until the time came for the show portions. I mean, when was the last time you actually were on the edge of your seat waiting for a Zoom call?
The structure of the performances lend themselves to dipping in and out of rooms, comparing notes with friends, and marveling as other participants interrogate, say, a corrupt politician about certain misdeeds, or attempt to get a family member to do the right thing, or act as messengers ferrying coded secrets from one character to another, much like an IRL immersive piece. It’s the same kind of feeling I used to get exploring the byzantine passages of the McKittrick Hotel and being sent on some quest by Hecate. To be able to recreate that same emotional landscape via an online medium is a feat in and of itself; add on a Discord server “owned” by an in-game character and an email address where said character responds to you in-world with hints, and the experience starts to scratch that oh-so-familiar transmedia and alternate reality game itch. Plus, the audience sizes in The House of Cenci are deliberately capped in order to allow players to have personal, intimate time with, say, the lady of the house who feels powerless or the gardener who doesn’t know how he can help the children out or a clergy member experiencing a real crisis of faith. There were times where I might be in a Zoom call with a live actor and either nobody else or only a few other players around. The pacing of the hour on Zoom also smartly builds up to end on a high emotional note — often with some action to be taken by the players or reveal of a shameful secret — that naturally led the players right back into the text game. And for those who are afraid that they can’t finish the text adventure game component in time between Zoom sessions, never fear: Parabolic smartly sends out all of the appropriate links just before the live performances start, just in case you’ve lost the links or didn’t complete the game part.
I will, however, note the time commitment to really “do” The House of Cenci can be intense. If you’re a completionist (and I am), expect to spend around a dozen hours or so total in the game portion, finding every secret passage, solving every puzzle, and going back to explore branches you didn’t wander the first playthrough. This is in addition to the three hours of Zoom sessions (three one-hour sessions, spread out across three weeks). Which means that you might spend up to 15–20 hours — spread out, of course — in the world that Parabolic has so smartly crafted.
But given the loving attention to detail, strong worldbuilding, and the ability to deeply engage with both the characters and the text game component meant that living through the experience didn’t necessarily feel like “work” or a ton of additional effort on my part. The House of Cenci felt like I was getting lost in a rich world of secrets, intrigue, violence, danger, and despair, but it is also a world which offers the players a chance at redemption, if we would only choose to take that path. And like any adventure game worth its salt, it feels like the choice is wholly ours.
Act 1 of The House of Cenci is free to play online; the final Act 1 Zoom session is on March 12. Tickets are £12.50. Attendance at the Act 1 Zoom session is required to progress to the other acts.
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