FAQs

Black Fell is an interactive digital opera. It’s a story through song, and therefore an opera. You encounter it on your computer rather than at a theatre: it is a digital artwork. Your actions within the virtual environment change the music that you hear and the path the story takes: it is an interactive game.

There is no goal to achieve: all paths lead to the same conclusion. There is no ‘right way’ to play - the game is designed so that even standing still should offer an engaging musical experience.

Each time you travel through the landscape you will encounter a different balance of musical elements, and quite probably a different sequence of text. With each journey you will uncover different aspects of the singers past and their emotions.

The voice is constantly travelling across the landscape. Move closer to her and she will be louder. If you like, you can allow her to lead you through the piece. There are also times when she chooses not to sing…

The game can be navigated by ear alone: you can toggle the visuals by pressing ‘v’ (for the trees) and ‘m’ (for the minimap).

This ‘sightless’ version of the game was the original concept and the authors consider it offers the most immersive experience from an audio perspective - you may find the quality of your listening changes quite dramatically!

However, particularly on an initial encounter, it can be difficult to understand how your actions within the game affect the music. The visuals are a sort of ‘inner landscape’ of the main character, and can assist you in making purposeful movements with clear impacts on the music and branching storyline.

At any given time in the game there are generally three types of musical material sounding within the landscape. The musical elements sound throughout the landscape, but each element is tied to a particular stone. The closer you are to that stone, the more you will hear of one type of material.

The ‘minimap’ can help you navigate. It dispays the standing stones, with the coloured areas representing where the different strands of music are most likely to be encountered. It can be hidden with the ‘m’ key.

There are points where the narrative branches and you can choose which route to follow. The colour of text corresponds to that of the standing stones - the closer you are to a particular colour of stone, the more likely that colour of text will be highlighted, indicating the path you will follow.

The position of the sounds alters according to your movements in real time. Sometimes, particularly with rapid movements, the computer processor gets behind the music and clicks and pops emerge.

Try closing down other tabs on your web browser and other programs to free up memory space. Different browsers also perform more or less effectively on different computers.

If you are playing on an older computer it may be difficult to remove these clicks entirely, though avoiding rapid mouse movements (head direction) can reduce them significantly.

This can happen when your web browser window is too small. Try maximising your browser window and this should solve the problem.

This can happen when your web browser window is too small. Try maximising your browser window and this should solve the problem.

Depending on the speed of your internet connection, your computer’s available processing power, and the available bandwidth on the server, the game may take a few moments to load. Please be patient. After loading for the first time it should be considerably quicker to load on subsequent visits.

Unfortunately, if you are on a mobile phone or tablet device it is unlikely that the game will run as the Unity WebGL engine is not designed to run on these platforms.

Black Fell runs in the Unity WebGL engine so that you do not need to download anything and can play directly in your web browser. Unfortunately Unity WebGL is not optimised for use on a phone or a tablet, though it may be able to run on the most recent models.