Playing Kafka review – a well-intentioned but sanitised attempt at adapting the unadaptable

PC; Charles Games
The forking paths and opaque traps of his writings might sound amenable to gaming. But the meaningful futility of his fiction doesn’t add up to much here

If Franz Kafka had lived to give notes on Playing Kafka, a new video game adaptation of his work, a big one might have been: where’s the sex? What this interactive version of The Trial has in branching narrative, it lacks in sexuality: one can imagine the author-cum-playtester apoplectic at the absence of sadomasochism and lust. Overall, the choices made in this literal and lightly interactive adaptation seem calibrated to what is appropriate to leave running on a museum iPad. Simple binary choices and touchscreen controls set the bar to entry low, and there is no imagery to scandalise a visiting classroom.

Playing Kafka, released just weeks before the centenary of Kafka’s death, is a collaboration between the Goethe-Institut and the developer Charles Games (a studio, not a person). It adapts Kafka’s unfinished and posthumously assembled novels The Trial and The Castle, along with a long, critical letter from Kafka to his father about their relationship.

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