Review of Kafka’s play: An admirable effort to adapt the unadaptable by Games

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If Franz Kafka were alive and commenting on the video game adaptation of his work, Playing Kafka, the big question might have been: “Where’s the sex?” This interactive version of The Trial has branching narratives, but it’s lacking in sexuality. It’s not hard to imagine the author and playtester being infuriated by the lack of sadomasochism or desire. Overall, the choices made in this literal and lightly interactive adaptation seem tuned to be appropriate for leaving it running on an iPad in a museum. The barrier to entry is low with simple binary choices and touchscreen controls, and there’s no imagery to frighten classroom visitors.

Playing Kafka, released just a few weeks before the 100th anniversary of Kafka’s death, is a collaboration between the Goethe-Institut and developer Charles Games (a studio, not an individual). It adapts Kafka’s unfinished novels The Trial and The Castle, along with lengthy, critical letters Kafka wrote to his father about their relationship.

The Trial lost the most in translation, speeding through the text and stripping away the complexities of its protagonist, reducing him to a hollow, docile avatar. Video game mechanics can offer stories and experiences other media can’t, but in this case they’re not enough to make up for what the developers gave up. And Kafka’s letters to his father don’t gain emotional weight from formulaic dialogue and pattern-matching puzzles; his father probably would have loved them.

Bigger and deeper than any of Kafka’s plots is his world and the Kafkaesque sense of an anonymous institution that is indifferent and incomprehensible to its participants. This contrasts with the practice of good game design, which demands clear rules, victory conditions, and systems that work as you expect them to. In Kafka’s world, the court is unknowable. It’s outside the courthouse, in attics and tenements, in wallpaper and lamplight. There may be no courthouse, no rules, no meaning at all.

So Playing Kafka doesn’t suggest that you can achieve anything with the experience. It’s full of movement without progress, choices without consequences. It can be a boring video game for players and purists. The German character light is adapted to the system and language of a mobile game with a story choice.

This is where The Castle works best: Kafka didn’t give the novel an ending, which may have relieved the developers of the pressure to reach a certain point; their version is free of burden and admirably silly and playful, a boring exercise in what is probably nothing.

Would Kafka approve? Of course not; he never wanted to publish it in the first place. But if Kafka’s adaptation doesn’t satisfy the author, it will trap him in a hell of his own making. Playing Kafka Playing Kafka would have been Kafka’s ultimate nightmare: lost in a maze of his own words, stumped by unclear (or non-existent) objectives, bewildered by dialogue options that offer no alternative, and ultimately unable to proceed after a glitch prevents his lawyer character from smashing through the floor. There’s something at least a little Kafkaesque about the idea.