The receptionist is standing behind the hotel desk, his back towards me. An uncomfortable moment passes as I wait for him to register my presence. He doesn’t move. A giant, Father Christmas-bearded man with colourful braces appears from a side door and silently sits in a tall chair. He looks directly at me, then his eyes flick to the bell on the reception desk. I ring it.
Slowly, the receptionist turns around, revealing round, dark glasses, crooked teeth and a lined, almost cruel face. He speaks in a slow, vaguely unsettling drawl, seemingly mistaking me for someone called Miss Ray, who is apparently here for her “final night”. I mumble in surprise. He pauses, removing his glasses to reveal unseeing eyes. He’s suspicious now, polite but threatening. He asks why I’m here. What do I tell him?
Welcome to The Isle Tide Hotel, an interactive film by brother and sister duo Grace and Harry Chadwick. That conversation with the creepy receptionist, played by Richard Brake, could go a number of different ways depending on how I respond. It could send me off following various different threads, meeting entirely separate characters, and leading to one of 11 distinct endings. Only by playing the game multiple times is it possible to discover all of the secrets and history of the Isle Tide Hotel.
But is it a game? Or is it a film? The answer is neither and both at the same time. A genre in between, a grey area. Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror: Bandersnatch was the catalyst for generating interest in the nascent interactive-film market back in 2018, introducing audiences to a story they could control using their TV remotes. Grace and Harry credit Brooker’s Netflix show with paving the way for their own projects. “It really allowed us to see that the mainstream market is ready for this,” says Grace.
Not only that, Bandersnatch provided an easy shorthand when talking to potential cast members and investors who might not be familiar with the world of video gaming. Grace says she could simply tell them to watch Bandersnatch and say: “This is the sort of thing that we’re trying to create,” rather than trying to explain what an interactive film actually is.
The setting, along with the cast of delightfully bizarre characters, brings to mind The Grand Budapest Hotel, and Harry says that Wes Anderson has been a big influence on the production, partly for practical reasons. Anderson’s style involves still “portraits”, almost like photographs, which works well for an interactive film where the story has to pause occasionally for the player to make a decision. “If you were constantly moving the camera, ebbing and flowing, and shooting like you would traditionally, then you would really feel the impact of those moments where suddenly it feels like the story has halted,” says Harry.
The plot revolves around an absent father, who receives a mysterious note from a private investigator telling him that his daughter, who he hasn’t seen since she was a baby, has been kidnapped. It leads him to the Isle Tide Hotel, where a strange cult is holding a celebration that occurs only once every three years. The story soon moves into sci-fi territory, as the protagonist Josh discovers that a scientist called Dr Aniston has discovered a method for body swapping. It feels a little like what might happen if Wes Anderson directed an episode of Doctor Who.
Dr Aniston is played by Georgie Glen, in an inspired piece of casting. Glen is perhaps best known for playing Miss Higgins in the BBC drama Call the Midwife, and it’s wonderful to see how her cheerful, smiling demeanour hides a sinister, ruthless edge here. She makes for the perfect cult leader. Grace says that Glen was suggested by their casting agent, Lucy Allen, and she was “personable and lovely” on set, even if she had little idea about what she was letting herself in for. “She said, ‘I have no idea what this concept is, I have no idea what interactive gaming is, but I love the script’,” recalls Grace.
Indeed, interactive films are a concept that both the film and the games industries are still trying to wrap their heads around. When it came to the actors’ wages, Grace says that they decided to treat the production as an indie film and pay them in line with the Equity rates, as well as giving a percentage of royalties. But it’s still such a new medium that guidelines haven’t yet been drawn up. “We’ve spoken with Spotlight about trying to come up with the norm and the standard that interactive experiences should have,” says Grace.
The pair discovered the wonderfully elaborate, Anderson-esque location when they were invited there for a family function (“I turned to Harry and I said, ‘This is the ultimate hotel’,” recalls Grace). They booked in for a summer of filming, although they soon found that they had to work around weddings and other events that were taking place at the hotel. At one point late in shooting, an inebriated wedding guest stole their clapperboard. “It was custom made,” laments Harry, who says they had to use a tiny replacement clapperboard which wasn’t nearly as good.
The filming was done at a rapid pace on a tight budget over the course of five weeks. Because of the branching narrative, Grace and Harry had to capture enormous amounts of footage compared with making a traditional indie film. Grace says they shot about 950 scenes in total, compared with an average of around 60 for a movie. That worked out at approximately 20 pages of script every day, when for a normal film you’d only expect to shoot perhaps four or five. There are around eight and a half hours of playable footage in the game, and the total amount of footage shot was a lot higher. Grace says that the slate numbers on their tiny clapperboard were reaching into the thousands by the end.
Both Grace and Harry have created several short films for virtual reality, as well as various adverts, but they wanted to do something really ambitious for their first interactive movie – something they often came to regret mid-production, says Grace. “We were like, ‘Why did we make everybody swap bodies, and why did we use 50 actors?’” she laughs. “Why didn’t we just have five in one room?” But their ambition has paid off: the myriad characters to follow mean each playthrough feels unique, with some people who might only appear in the background of one run ending up taking centre stage in another.
The Isle Tide Hotel’s publisher, Wales Interactive, is an old hand at this kind of stuff, having put out its first interactive movie, The Bunker, way back in 2016, in the pre-Bandersnatch days. The market for FMV [full motion video] games such as these is slowly growing, says Grace, especially in Europe: “We know that Turkey is a huge market for FMV, surprisingly,” she says, also noting that the smallest market is the UK, again somewhat surprisingly. Asia is also receptive to interactive films, and she says part of the reason that they chose an Agatha Christie/Wes Anderson style was that they know it goes down well in the Asian market.
It’s still a niche genre, though. Grace estimates Wales Interactive has an established fan base of around 200,000. There’s also the issue of distribution. The Isle Tide Hotel is available on PC, consoles and phones, but it feels like its natural home should be on a TV streaming service, which would also offer the best way to take the genre mainstream. Grace thinks this might be the way things are going, with interactive films and TV shows becoming more common. “Sky have just released an interactive gaming box,” she says. “They’re all moving towards getting people engaged with their content, just because everybody knows that the attention span of today’s audiences is quite quick. And if you don’t get them readily engaged with the content, they’re on their phone.”
• The Isle Tide Hotel is available now on Nintendo Switch, PC, PS4/5 and Xbox
