Cuba’s next indie game is powered by fear, family, and the sun

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It is, perhaps, the perfect time in Cuba to make a horror game.

Intertwined oil shortages and an economic crisis sparked by fuel shortages and the continued U.S. embargo, have rocked the island nation, leading to daily rolling blackouts as well as food, water, and medical shortages.

Back in 2016, when Cuban indie developer Josuhe Pagliery, started work on his first game, it garnered international attention at a time when he thought things couldn’t get any more difficult.

“I always believed Saviorless would be the game of difficulties,” Pagliery told me recently via email. “If you remember, there was no internet on the island in 2016 when development began. And it turns out that now we’re living through daily blackouts of 20 hours! One dollar equals 510 Cuban pesos compared to 24 in 2016; without exaggeration, more than 85 percent of the people who collaborated on the first project are now outside of Cuba; and to top it off, there’s now also the risk of an invasion or the implementation of a total naval blockade.”

Now, deep in development on his second game, Pagliery says the increasing difficulty of not just making a game in Cuba, but surviving, has helped to shape what this new title will be.

“After two quite stressful months with these thoughts in the middle of blackouts, I realized that making this game, with this subject matter, in this particular moment and context possessed a unique value as a work,” he wrote. “The potential to become an artistic record of what appears to be the end of an era in Cuba. I convinced myself that my terrible context could also be used as an artistic opportunity.”

His new game, Tasteless, is a low-poly 3D first-person horror game with a heavy narrative focus.

Pagliery hopes it will be the second title in a trilogy of “less” games that revolve around the concept of emptiness, and which shares some references in common with his first game.

You can read the full column, which was first published April 10 on Game.