Review: ARCADE by DARKFIELD

Guests step into a war-ravaged world and take control of their own digital avatar in DARKFIELD's latest immersive audio experience, Arcade.

Photo: Kate Edwards

After only a few months away from the capital, DARKFIELD has returned with a short residency at Shoreditch Town Hall. Their takeover of the Town Hall basement venue, The Ditch, is made up of three in-person debuts for DOUBLE, VISITORS and ETERNAL, which all previously premiered under the company's digital DARKFIELD Radio banner, and their latest show ARCADE, serves as the 'headliner' of the event.

DARKFIELD is best known for creating 360-degree sound experiences delivered through headphones such as FLIGHT, COMA and SÉANCE, which use binaural audio, intricate sound design, sensory effects and complete darkness to immerse guests in intense audio-based shows that typically take place in their trademark shipping containers.

Photo: Kate Edwards

For the first time in a DARKFIELD experience, guests now have the agency to decide how their story unfolds. Taking control of Milk, an amnesic avatar dropped into the middle of an ongoing war between the North Block and South Block, guests respond to questions and prompts by pressing the single button on the panel of their individual arcade machine to answer 'Yes', with no response signalling 'No'. In addition, there's a coin slot and return tray to facilitate 'paying' for items such as guns and access to areas that are otherwise off-limits. They're all pretty limited ways of interacting with the story as it develops, but for something so basic, the paths it leads you down are branching and varied.

Within ARCADE, these 'Yes' or 'No' decisions can have drastic consequences. A wrong answer can result in your avatar being killed at a moment's notice (something we found out less than a minute into our playthrough), and the trajectory of your story can veer off in a wildly different direction from what other guests are experiencing without you even realising how it happened.

Photo: Kate Edwards

Violence is near enough guaranteed within the world of ARCADE, regardless of whether you try to be a pacifist or mercenary, and with every bullet fired comes some practical effects built into the arcade machine that remove the barrier between what you hear and what you feel. There's a tension and anxiety built into the show's sound design that only amplifies as you get deeper into the experience, and every decision begins to carry more weight.

Across the board, the voice acting is well done - Milk's emotionless, simple replies raise questions around just how desensitised they've become to the world around them despite only just spawning in, and the wide range of creepy and opportunistic characters Milk meets along the way all carry an off-putting air to them.

Photo: Kate Edwards

It'd be redundant of us to give details on exactly what happened to our avatar during our time with ARCADE, as everyone's experience will differ greatly, but it's worth noting that the tone of this experience is much darker than any of DARKFIELD's previous work. Offhandedly, characters will offer up activities or new paths that'd turn heads and have the police called if said outside the confines of your headphones.

The show's setting - a dystopian world in which the lives of people hold little value - goes some way to explaining why the characters Milk encounters are so void of empathy or compassion, but it's nonetheless surprising to hear people talk about shooting animals and children in the same way we'd suggest grabbing a coffee.

Photo: Kate Edwards

For completionists who want to explore every narrative diversion and unlock every possible situation, ARCADE might present a challenge with its limited run-time and expansive list of branching storylines. If you're happy to let your coins fall where they may and not stress too much about what you've missed out on, ARCADE is a unique and unsettling half-hour in a dystopian nightmare. Time will tell if DARKFIELD chooses to continue offering guests the same level of agency available in ARCADE, but if the choice were presented to us, we'd be tapping the button on our arcade machine.

★★★★

---

ARCADE is playing at Shoreditch Town Hall alongside three other DARKFIELD audio experiences until 17th April 2025. To book and find out more info, visit shoreditchtownhall.com

For more reviews of experiences like DARKFIELD's ARCADE, check out our recent Reviews.