 Its favourite thing to do is to crawl inside a flower, where petals turn light pink, yellow or red A small girl is eating ice cream. She is at a lake, “Zoo Lake”, in the middle of a city. People who live nearby hear the Zoo’s lions roaring at night. (A world and a century away, in Innisfree, Yeats lives “alone in the bee-loud glade”.) The principal activities at this lake are learning to ride bikes, riding bikes, and walking. Ice-cream sellers pedal their cooler boxes round and round the water. Bees hover over the rubbish bins full of ice-cream wrappers. The girl has stopped eating her Zooty Fruit because a bee has landed on her mouth. It walks, vibrating, around the edge of her lips, drinking the melted syrup. Then it takes flight. And the girl leaves with her family. They leave because they know – because the father tells them – that the bee will soon be back “with all its friends”. The bee arrives at the hive and crawls in. Maybe it is a young bee. It starts dancing with all its might, swearing on its life: “Guys, guys, I swear, come with me. I found a good spot, I swear.” In a slow-motion black-and-white video, the paper wasp is preparing to sting. It is held by tweezers. Its body bends backwards in a way that only an insect’s could, in an uncanny, creepy way that lets you know the wasp’s friends are the scorpion and the centipede. Held by another set of tweezers, the honey bee’s behaviour is completely different (is this not the fundamental thing about the bee’s nature: that it is not a wasp). Consider: the bee flails all its legs as though its body is falling through the air – this is what it feels like for a bee to be suspended, but not in flight. It moves its head side to side like a puppy. It seems worried. When the wasp is made to sting a piece of clear silicone, it does so with its head bowed just slightly, as though a medical procedure is being performed on part of its body and it is breathing through the discomfort. In goes the sting, and the wasp seems to relax. The bee hunches over, lowering its head to the silicone. Its mouth opens and closes, kissing the ground. This is its final gesture before it dies. Inside its body, the two glands in its venom sac are releasing liquids that, alone, are not harmful. When mixed they are toxic. The sting’s hooked teeth ensures that once inserted it cannot be pulled out – but the bee tries, and the organ rips from its body, taking some intestine with it. A bee also has a heart, but it cannot have a heart attack. It makes bee “bread” – fermented pollen – and honey, and to complete its breakfast, it sometimes drinks nectar from caffeinated plants. When it does this, its memory improves. The bee’s favourite thing to do is to crawl inside a flower, where petals turn the light pink or yellow or red. Their wings are clear, their feelers ever-waving. Their back legs, when dressed in fluffy pollen trousers: heartbreaking.
{{#ticker}} {{topLeft}} {{bottomLeft}} {{topRight}} {{bottomRight}} {{#goalExceededMarkerPercentage}}{{/goalExceededMarkerPercentage}} {{/ticker}}{{#paragraphs}}{{.}} {{/paragraphs}}{{highlightedText}}{{#choiceCards}}{{/choiceCards}} We will be in touch to remind you to contribute. Look out for a message in your inbox in . If you have any questions about contributing, please contact us. Topics View commentsView on theguardian.com {{#showContent}} {{#description}}{{/description}}{{#content}}{{#headline}} {{#isComment}}{{/isComment}} {{#showWebPublicationDate}} {{webPublicationDate}}{{/showWebPublicationDate}}{{headline}}{{/headline}}{{/content}}{{/showContent}}{{#showContent}}{{#description}}{{/description}}{{#content}}{{#headline}} {{#isComment}}{{/isComment}} {{#description}}{{/description}}{{#content}}{{#headline}} {{#isComment}}{{/isComment}} {{#showWebPublicationDate}} {{webPublicationDate}}{{/showWebPublicationDate}}{{headline}}{{/headline}}{{/content}}{{/showContent}}{{#showContent}}{{#description}}{{/description}}{{#content}}{{#headline}} {{#isComment}}{{/isComment}} {{#showWebPublicationDate}} {{webPublicationDate}}{{/showWebPublicationDate}}{{headline}}{{/headline}}{{/content}}{{/showContent}}Uncommon item Buy price: 10gp Sell price: 5gp Description: a glass or clay jar containing a hive of very angry bees. Effects: when thrown, the jar breaks upon impact with any object, releasing a large amount of bees in a 30ft sphere for 2 turns. All creatures that start or end their turn in the area must succeed a DC13 DEX or CON save or suffer 2d4 poison damage. Other uses: the holder of the Jar of Bees may add 1d4 to an intimidation roll by vigorously shaking the jar.
PC, Mac, short Here’s a major flaw of mine: I frequently fall into the trap of thinking games have “responsibility”. I too easily find myself thinking, “It’s pretty irresponsible for this game to do X,” or, “…to not say Y.” I don’t know how I keep lapsing into that, but I think it’s almost certainly to do with the pervasive modern trend that the rest of the world is obligated to protect us. Shut In feels like it should be an “irresponsible game”. It is not. It’s a game tangentially about depression, about the feeling of not being able to leave the house. That it doesn’t resolve depression, that it doesn’t offer some supposed hope or “cure”, and that it presents any notion of mental health issues as horror tropes, if anything makes it a more honest, realistic depiction than those with flowers and sunshine by the end. Sorry, spoilers? Nah, I think you’ll have gotten the idea it’s not going anywhere happy pretty early on. It’s also going to make you fail. Now, aside from any other issues, there are many who immediately baulk at any game that kills you unfairly. I tend to be a case-by-case sort of person. Inside? Hateful. Rick Dangerous? Unacceptable. But here, as in many other examples, it’s a core element of solving the game. You learn to solve puzzles by getting them “wrong”, the game mocks you for that, then you start again from immediately before. Which is the other aspect that makes this 2D point-and-click adventure feel like it’s Not Taking The Subject Seriously Enough: it’s funny. It’s darkly funny. It’s cruelly funny. Your overarching goal is to get out of bed and leave your house. Except there are problems, like how comfy your pyjamas are, the missing key to your bedroom door, and that the staircase downstairs has been replaced by a yawning chasm of unutterable darkness. As if that weren’t enough of an issue, you’re also accompanied by not so much an unreliable narrator, as a complete dickhead of a narrator. He hates you. The game hates you. It thinks you’re stupid. So then I worry. What if someone playing is dealing with horrendous issues of self-loathing, of being trapped in their house by the own fear – how is a game that on the surface mocks this, taunts the player for this, going to help anyone? Well, it’s likely not going to. Although, I imagine for some there will be an element of catharsis. For others there might be laughter as they see their own situation satirised. There will be some for whom it will be staggeringly unhelpful to play a game that repeatedly calls you an idiot. And there will be those who will find it flat-out offensive. If the way I’ve described it sounds problematic to you, I strongly recommend you don’t play. I have mental heath issues. Sometimes it gets so bad I don’t feel like I can leave the house. At its very worst I have been stuck in bed, unable to get up, too paralysed by all-encompassing fear. I’ve lived those moments where the staircase feels like a monstrous descent into a maw of visceral danger. I don’t think Shut In has anything particularly insightful to say about these feelings, nor impressively evokes them in its play. It’s just a horror game that represents such fear as actual impending threat and doom. And that’s fine too. I call BS that this game is, as its marketing claims, a reaction to Covid-19 lockdowns. It has nothing at all to do with that, and I suspect was thought of beforehand. But it’s definitely about the crappy horror of anxiety and agoraphobia. And as I say, it’s actually about it, rather than some beacon of hope within it. Or it’s just a mean super-short horror game in which you’re repeatedly mocked, both by unfair deaths and a very horrid narrator.
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What are the bees for in shut in
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