THE ISLE TIDE HOTEL
The latest in a long line of interactive movies published by Wales Interactive, The Isle Tide Hotel has been created by Interflix Media, a company set up by Grace and Harry Chadwick in 2021, who previously worked in VR films. It tells the story of a father who must rescue his teenage daughter from a cult, and offers seven different endings, although some paths are locked behind narrative puzzles.
The very first issue of Edge, way back in 1993, featured a prescient quote from Mark Lewis, then vice president of Electronic Arts. “I foresee a day when you go to a movie theatre, there’s about 300 people there, and between you, you all play the movie,” he said. “From your seats, you control what happens.”
Thirty years later, we’re watching almost exactly this scenario play out at a cinema in London. There might not be quite as many as 300 people at this screening of The Gallery, the new interactive film from director Paul Raschid, but we’re collectively playing the movie, making key choices and deciding how the film ends.
After years of promises, hype and disappointment, it feels like the interactive film movement is finally gaining ground. Over the past few years we’ve seen a number of interactive TV shows produced by Netflix, starting with Charlie Brooker’s groundbreaking Black Mirror: Bandersnatch in 2018, which has been followed by nearly two dozen interactive shows and cartoons, most tying into existing properties, including Puss In Boots, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Boss Baby. Perhaps most improbable of all is Bear Grylls’ You Vs Wild, in which you make decisions that will decide whether or not the survivalist… well, survives. At the same time, studios such as Wales Interactive and Flavourworks have wholeheartedly embraced the genre, developing new tools for creating interactive films, as well as pioneering new forms of interaction.
Getting to this point, though, has been a struggle. Part of the reason why interactive movies have taken so long to get off the ground is technical: the ability to store and quickly access huge, high-fidelity video files has only really become feasible in the past decade or so. But interactive films also face something of an identity crisis, positioned as they are uncomfortably between the realms of movies and videogames, being neither and both at the same time. Too ‘gamey’ for traditional film-industry executives to consider; perhaps
