Wer Ist Wer / Chi è Chi
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An escape room and a game book created for the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Wer Ist Wer is a cross-media escape room set in a dystopian state inspired by
the paranoid and obsessive atmosphere of Eastern Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The first edition of the installation was staged at
Polo del '900
in Turin in 2019, and in July 2020, during the COVID pandemic, the
Triennale Milano Teatro
stage hosted WER IST WER Z, a live-streamed version of the experience that was playable from home.
Chi è Chi is an interactive game book that was conceived as a printed version
of the live escape room Wer Ist Wer, with the goal of making the narrative and the
puzzles of the game accessible and playable through printed matter and an interactive web application.
Chi è chi is available on Amazon.
I took care of the assets and illustrations for the escape room, the layouts of the book,
the UI design of the web app and the creation
of the video trailer.
A project by We Are Müesli.
Who is who
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The title Wer Ist Wer, meaning "Who is who" in German, was a sort of
motto for the East German secret police, the Stasi, and its leader, Erich Mielke.
In the fiction of the game, players need to analyze the lives
of 9 fellow citizens of a fictional state, in order to evaluate their loyalty to its rules.
A visual identity for SCHLOSS
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SCHLOSS, the secret police in the game's fictional world, needed a recognizable
visual identity that could communicate a sense of cleaniness, dystopian distortion of
human values and obsession for control.
We tried to achieve that with a mixture of flat illustrations that only depict
small details and very assertive, all-caps typography.
Wer Ist Wer also featured a series of propaganda videos, conceived as
distorted renditions of ads from the 50s and 60s.
The escape book
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In order to translate the experience of the live escape room to a book,
we needed to find a way to encapsulate the game props and the video footage of the
9 characters onto printed pages.
We did that through the metaphor of the archive, as Chi è Chi presents itself as a sort
of physical folder containing photos, dialogue transcriptions and personal information about the 9 subjects.
Recognitions
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Wer Ist Wer and Chi è Chi were selected in the 2021 ADI Design Index catalogue and for the Best Applied Game award in the 2021 Italian Video Game Awards.