Channel your inner Brendan Gleeson in The Banshees of Inisherin browser game, available to play now.
There was a time when major films frequently got their own video game tie-in regardless of whether they were suitable fodder or not. Director Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning Platoon, for example, was turned into a 2D run-and-gun for assorted 1980s computers. It’s fair to say the game didn’t exactly capture the full horror of the Vietnam war in quite the same way Stone’s film did.
Which brings us Banshees: The Game, a charmingly lo-fi browser diversion based on the multiple BAFTA-winning 2022 drama, The Banshees of Inisherin. The film was a black, quietly poignant comedy about a dying friendship on a remote Irish Island, with likeably crumpled turns from Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell. Banshees: The Game turns it all into a Pac-Man-like maze game in which you play a 16-bit Brendan Gleeson, frantically trying to avoid the attention of Colin Farrell (and other characters from the film) as you try to collect all your severed fingers.
Collect the fingers, avoid Colin and get to the pub. Sounds like a regular day to us. Credit: Cogs & Marvel.
It’s fair to say that if you haven’t seen the film then the severed fingers won’t mean much to you, but the maze game itself is a decent one. It also takes the logical step of adding an extra enemy to the maze as you progress, making it a bit more approachable than Pac-Man’s immediate onslaught of four angry ghosts.
Like the video game tie-ins of the eighties and nineties, Banshees misplaces just about all of the film’s pathos and nuanced characterisation. But then again, it is essentially about a person who desperately wants to avoid his neighbours and get down to the pub for a nice, quiet pint – which, let’s face it, is a pretty universal theme.
Banshees: The Game is the work of “one-of-a-kind experiential agency” Cogs & Marvel, and you can play it in your browser right here.
