Reposted by Edge Mag Archive
My artwork is in the latest Edge magazine, as part of an interview with the lovely @danthat.bsky.social
Edge Mag Archive
@edgemagarchive.bsky.social
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The past of interactive entertainment. Celebrating more than 30 years of videogame history through 425+ issues of Edge magazine. By @jeffsayhi.bsky.social
![hat is jubensha? After a day at
• Jubensha Con, "the world's first convention dedicated to English-
language jubensha", where I played two of them... I am genuinely unsure of the answer.
Here's what I do know. Jubensha is a kind of in-person game that has been enormous in China for over a decade now. There it has spawned dedicated escape-room-style venues, TV-show formats and, according to Chronic Insanity, one of the organisers of this event,
"a billion-yuan [about £100m] industry".
'Jubensha' itself translates from Chinese as something like 'murder-mystery script.
The games are a sort of weird offshoot of tabletop RPGs, hybridised with those old murder-mystery dinner-party games and the social deduction of Among Us or The Traitors on TV. At least, I think so. Because, despite all the lying skills I've honed for these games, I was telling the truth about being uncertain.
I first became aware of jubensha from a
2024 People Make Games video. As it turns out, pretty much every creator at this event - notably excepting Suspense Studio, which was featured in that video - first found about it the same way. And, because none of the English jubensha designers I meet seem to speak any Chinese,
they're effectively
reverse-engineering a genre from this one video, plus maybe a couple of Suspense's anglophone creations.
And now here I am, trying to reverse-engineer an understanding from two of those people's games, picked from ten on offer at Jubensha Con. These are Incog Games' Spy Of The Year, and All Falls Down: Sorroborough from the aforementioned Chronic Insanity.
What do they have in common? Well, neither features a single murder.
Spy Of The Year is a comedy game set at an espionage awards do, in which we play pastiches of James Bond, George Smiley, etc.
Sorroborough, meanwhile, has overtones of
Yellowjackets: we're a group of old university friends on a reunion trip when our plane crashes, leaving us all miraculously unharmed.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:a3m54c4suf2odoycgsx4fv6v/bafkreiamvohv4ptkpdawcqr5lilcn24ufzutjmqkjbyzeysrme5k3mvbqu)
