It was during David Bowie’s self-awarded year off that Quantic Dream – “a couple of French charmers and an Irishman,” as he would later remember – requested his knack for reinvention be applied to their videogame. Conceptually, The Nomad Soul might have seemed a statement of the obvious, that the lot of gamers is to wander nomadically from one imagined universe to the next, from one character incarnation to another. But the journey through Omikron, the thought-policed, decadent hive, criticised widely for its mechanical infrastructure, was anything but familiar.

Had it been exclusively either a vanity project for Bowie and his friends or a wildly ambitious experiment for David Cage, it would have been half the game it was.  Instead The Nomad Soul was a collision of wills and a contest of ideas. The creative friction between its authors established for it an unorthodox, captivating balance that, from a technical standpoint, is better appreciated now than it was in 1999. The versatility of Quantic’s proprietary engine means it can run at higher resolutions than many current games would dare attempt while its texture scaling, as aided by a particularly well-rendered library of original assets, is stubbornly attractive. But how, with a notoriously tight save system and action anachronistic even then, does the game still possess gravity?



Ethnic diversity may be Omikron’s leading architectural trait (its social model arguably born more of reference to Logan’s Run, THX 1138 and Blade Runner than any real-world example), but the game’s strength as an interactive experience stems more from an ideological pluralism. It’s a tale of two Davids, in fact, one with a desire to break boundaries of depth and scale in videogames, the other eyeing the medium as a fitting stage for progressive performance art. Luckily, the ideals of Cage, based as they were in the highly mechanised world of game development, also imbued Omikron with a conservatism that chimes off the freely rebellious sentiments of Bowie. The often awkward puzzles, movements and interactions that transpired in its high-rises, catacombs and streets were, as it happened, vital to the characterisation of its stolid society.

Perhaps unwittingly, then, Omikron stages a clash between the machinery of 3D gaming, as embodied by the city’s cool and repressive government computer Ix, and the inevitably disruptive influence of an outsider embodied by Boz, Bowie’s autobiographical digital dissident, and his physical-world counterparts The Dreamers. As hopelessly hackneyed as the game’s tale of soul-stealing and demonic possession is, a more substantial theme resonates throughout on the aforementioned, more organic level. Moreover, the inputs of Bowie, fashion designer wife Iman and musical collaborator Reeves Gabrels feel so dismissive of gaming formulae that they shore up the game’s potentially trifling identity. Omikron is championed as a very real place by fans of The Nomad Soul, and realism in this case doesn’t necessarily mean accuracy, sophistication or believability.



“What does it matter if I die? It’s only a video game,” says your avatar (we use no character names as, by this point, you may already have assumed another) when confronted with the game’s first titanic gob of exposition. “You’re wrong,” is the reply. “This universe is just as real as yours.” The genius of an otherwise juvenile premise – that the arch-demon Astaroth has secretly governed Omikron for years so as to swell his Reservoir Of Souls, distributing his own videogame across parallel universes to entrap more soul-strong players – is in this positioning of its world not only outside of ours, but through a looking glass of videogame technology. Most alternate realities offer an excuse to manufacture the extraordinary – The Nomad Soul’s allows it to also shrug off the ridiculous with ease.

So, presented with the Venetian canals of Lahoreh, the red light district of Qalisar, the Moroccan backstreets of Jaunpur and the abundant technical shortfalls that distance them all from planet Earth, we choose to seek out what they do offer rather than what their flickering textures and dense fogs suggest they can’t. It sounds like a triumph of art design, but while that certainly plays its part, this game achieves more through an under-documented discipline: information design. What makes this especially interesting is that by most of the accepted standards of signposting The Nomad Soul is an expository mess. It prioritises a passive assimilation of tidbits about the people, places and past of Omikron far above the more pressing acquisition of mission-specific tip-offs. This is a failure on a most crucial front and yet this game, frowned upon by critics for that very reason, seems strangely impervious.