Mark your calendars: Franz Kafka, the Prague-born novelist who lent his name to the feeling of alienation one experiences amid the machinations of modern bureaucracy, is getting his very own video game.
Mif2000, creator of Steampunk Odyssey and a game based on Hamlet, will release The Franz Kafka Videogame at some point in 2014. You can expect allusions to The Metamorphosis — insects, a general feeling of malaise — and some of the procedural absurdity for which Kafka's best known. (Will there be a Harrow?) Here's the trailer.
But, will it remain true to its source material? It's easy to make something pretty and "surreal" and call it Kafkaesque, but it's difficult to engage Kafka's ideas in a way that's both entertaining and rewarding. "Evil is whatever distracts," Kafka once wrote. Let's hope that this isn't a diversion, but a new way to explore the man's indispensable works. (Pink Is the New Blog)