The tried and tested of I Am Jesus Christ, simulator of the life of Jesus in which you run a lot and perform miracles, the perfect game for Easter
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Who reading the canonical Gospels has not asked himself questions about some of the narrative holes contained therein? Who would not have wanted to deepen some aspects with sequels, spin-offs or clarifications? Who hasn’t looked for the authors’ social profiles to protest this or that narrative turn?
We know that curiosity gnaws at your soul, as it gnaws at us, but then we have tried I Am Jesus Christ and a world has opened up for us.
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Gospel reading
For example, we finally found out what he did Jesus of Nazareth, the protagonist of the game, before reaching John the Baptist. From the famous passage of the Gospel, Matthew 3: 1-12, we know that the Baptist, dressed in camel hair and a leather belt, fed on grasshoppers and wild honey, baptized people in the Jordan River, hearing the confession of their sins. . After the passage of the Pharisees and Sadducees admonished by the Baptist, the arrival of Jesus is told: “Then Jesus from Galilee came to the Jordan to John, to be baptized by him.” Who hasn’t wondered how he got there? What did Jesus do before starting his preaching?
Here is the missing part: “At that time Jesus lived with the alarm clock Maria and Joseph always asleep in their home in Nazareth. One day divine grace caused an exclamation point to appear on Mary, making her a quest giver. Jesus, awakened by the words of a Holy Spirit with his strangely sensual voice, went to speak with his mother, taking on his first official mission as a son of God: to find John the Baptist.
Mary did not know where he was, so Jesus had to ask for information from a random girl from the city where he had lived for about thirty years, but where strangely no one knew him, who took him to the market to talk to a merchant, who sent him finally by another man, who finally knew something. The guy gave him an appointment for the next morning on the road leading out of Nazareth. Jesus returned to Mary who was pleased with her success, then went to sleep to rest for the long journey. The next morning he retraced all the way back to his guide who, after a loading screen, left him near the Jordan River in an area full of bushes filled with succulent wild berries. After running hundreds of meters, listening to the words of the Gospel (activated by fire writings that appear from time to time) and learning to eat to survive, Jesus finally arrived on the Jordan River. “
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Gameplay
If you haven’t figured it out yet, I Am Jesus Christ is afirst person adventure in which they take on the role of Jesus. We had the opportunity to try it for a few hours and we discovered that it aims to be much more serious and rigorous than we thought, even in the face of some solutions that can make you smile, at least indirectly. Jesus of him is a kind of athlete, capable of running for long minutes without ever getting tired and of making considerable leaps, with which he can jump over walls and other obstacles. Besides, he is also immortal, because he can fall from great heights without doing anything. Here, if we were to describe the game of Simulate M in short, we would define it as a title in which you run a lot, often for entire minutes, in environments that are sometimes very bare, to reach the next interaction. Obviously the version we tested is not the definitive one, so we don’t allow ourselves to make definitive judgments on the gameplay, but we still got an idea, as it inevitably is.
Now, it is difficult to make a video game on Gospels and I Am Jesus Christ seems to demonstrate this fully. In fact, it tells the different moments of the years of Jesus’ preaching through a series of linear interactions, which reconstruct the events step by step, transforming them into many small quests.
We are faced with a game made up of known situations (spoiler: Jesus dies, but rises again) that tries to be as respectful as possible towards the source text, sometimes failing to find an effective key to interpret everything through the videogame language, which is used in a basic way. As serious as it is in tone, it is inevitable that we smile when seeing Maria give us a quest or having to retrace areas already visited to perform some action (the famous evangelical backtracking).
In addition, the situations “Press F to pay respects“are continuous and inevitable, and lead to the question of whether it would be better for some things to happen automatically, without input from the player. The same survival mechanics appear strange when applied to Jesus, who as it is told lived alone for forty days in the desert, but that in the game he has to eat all the time. In general the experience is not displeased and we will certainly try the final version, but it is difficult to define whether we were involved more by I Am Jesus Christ itself or by the indirect enjoyment due to the perception of the inadequacy of the genre towards the source text. Certainly an interesting title for what it tries to do.
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Technical note
Dal technical point of view currently there is little to say. As warned by the author, the test version is far from definitive and lacks many optimizations, so it would not make sense to comment on it in depth talking about its lack of fluidity or some elements out of place. On our own we appreciated the efforts made to recreate credible environments even if it is inevitable that some elements are quite poor, so to speak, as it is a work done by one person. However, it is really too early to draw conclusions.
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I Am Jesus Christ is a strange game, which tries to translate the Gospels into a first-person adventure, while also taking itself very seriously. It is difficult to say from the test version how successful he was or not, although there are some elements of sure interest, first of all the way in which he tried to reread the deeds of Jesus through conventional game mechanics. He still has a long way to go, so it is right to suspend judgment.
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CERTAINTIES
- Very serious and rigorous
- It seems to have its moments and a good dose of courage
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DOUBTS
- Seeing the Gospels translated into a video game has a strange effect
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