Out damned Spotify.
Here’s some videogame news you don’t see every day. The Royal Shakespeare Company, known mainly for its contemporary adaptations of the Bard’s plays, has announced a video game adaptation of MacBeth. Titled Lili, the game is a modern “screen-life thriller” in which players experience Shakespeare’s bloodiest story through Lady MacBeth’s personal devices.
According to a press release, Lili is set in a “stylised, neo-noir version” of modern-day Iran. Blending live-action footage with interactive elements, it reimagines MacBeth’s witches as hackers who break into Lady MacBeth’s phone, computer etc, “putting the player at the heart of the story and given them a unique perspective into the world of the play.”
Lili is being made in collaboration with two other companies: iNK Stories, an independent game studio based in New York, and Alambic Production, the company of Iranian actress Zar Amir, who plays Lady MacBeth in the game. According to the release, Lili “explores themes of technological domination, the manipulation of information ,and institutional violence,” with Amir drawing from “her lived experience as an Iranian woman in exile who has courageously confronted her own battles against authoritarian oppression.”
It all sounds very Sam Barlow-ish, and while the RSC doesn’t explain how the game will play, we can draw some inferences from an accompanying screenshot. The image shows what looks like a PC desktop with several camera feeds open, while a row of buttons at the bottom are labelled things like “Whisper”, “Deepweb” and “SIM clone”. While Her Story is the easier comparison, Lili looks like it’ll have more in common with Telling Lies.
It’s certainly a bold opening gambit for the RSC’s first foray into video games, merging an adapted setting with an entirely new method of storytelling. Then again, I’m a big fan of all Sam Barlow’s games, and I’m well up for a bit of Shakespeare-infused digital sleuthing provided Lili can hit that same quality bar.
Lili will release “later in 2025”. But if you’re hankering for some interactive Shakespeare right now, Lili isn’t the first game to be based on one of big Bill’s plays. Most notable is 2019’s Elsinore, a point-and-click game based on Hamlet where you play as Ophelia, trying to avert the tragic fate that awaits Elsinore Castle and everyone in it. There are other adaptations of Hamlet too, such as Tin Man Games’ To Be or Not To Be, where you need to guide Hamlet & co through a narrative death-gauntlet, and the passive-aggressively titled Hamlet: or the Last Game without MMORPG Features, Shaders and Product Placement. Games and Shakespeare also recently coincided in Grand Theft Hamlet, the excellent documentary about a bunch of GTA Online roleplayers attempting to stage Shakespeare’s most famous play inside the game.
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