A Line Held Tight – miners, mechs and mismanagement on a distant planet
Deep underground the player joins a colony of ruthlessly exploited pit workers who could be taking on the bosses. How things play out will depend on you
It is rare for video games to feature industrial action as a key theme, but it does happen. There’s the shady Dockworker’s Union in Disco Elysium and the Orbital Workers Union in space adventure Tacoma; then there is Lynx, the evil union-bashing corp in Hardspace: Shipbreaker. Soon we can add A Line Held Tight, a visual novel that puts workers’ rights – and workers’ lives – at the very centre of the narrative.
In the distant future, a colony of miners digs far beneath the surface of an isolated planet, searching for veins of some exotic ore, protected from the poisonous atmosphere within giant mech suits. But the working conditions are woeful and as a strike looms, an unpopular employee named the Canary must decide whether or not to stand with colleagues and fight against suppression. The player, of course, takes on the role of the Canary, navigating personal as well as political struggles in a world rendered in stark monochrome.
Although there are clear parallels with the miners’ strike in 80s Britain, Humble Grove’s three-person team was inspired by a situation closer to home. “My interest in telling a story about a trade union comes from our own industry’s burgeoning union interest in the face of mass layoffs,” says co-founder Cel Davison. “People who write sci-fi generally speaking fall into one of two camps: those who are interested in writing speculative futures and those who use futuristic settings to tell stories that are reflections of our present. We tend to fall into the latter end of that spectrum.”
Using the highly adaptable narrative game engine Narrat, the game provides a dynamic story guided by player choices. The Canary has a complicated personal connection with the mine, the union and its leaders, which the player has to make sense of. “We’re very interested in the internal workings and conflicts within a collective, how they can make or break a political movement. Our protagonist the Canary starts off as someone quite disinterested in politics, but finds themself in situations where they have to decide what and who they really care about. There’s a lot of variables behind the scenes tracking how the mine’s inhabitants feel about the Canary and the decisions they make.”
Although the game is set in the distant future on an alien planet, elements of it are very grounded in British history. It has a traditional folk soundtrack, recorded by two of Humble Grove, Davison and Beck Michalak, who both play at folk sessions in Yorkshire where mining and union-related songs are common. The game’s visuals resemble charcoal sketches providing a stark, almost Victorian feel. “We first got the idea from some wonderful charcoal drawings at the Wakefield Coal Mining Museum,” says Davison. “Charcoal gives a great coal-like feel, and being a traditional medium gives it a grounded textural feel, but conversely when we worked with it we found it can create some very gauzy, ghostly imagery. This really mirrors the way the Canary processes the world as someone trapped in their own head, especially at the beginning of the game.”
Humble Grove’s debut game No Longer Home was a thoughtful meditation on moving house and leaving a life behind; it looks like A Line Held Tight will take a similarly meditative approach. This time however, the themes are more prescient than Humble Grove may have intended. “I hope it helps people consider how their everyday actions can have political consequences,” says Davison. “If I’m being really honest I hope it convinces more people to join a union.”
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