Forget everything you thought you knew about Ikumi Nakamura. Forget her artwork for Ōkami and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Evil Within, forget her 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:quirky E3 presentation, and forget even her creative direction for 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Ghostwire: Tokyo. Except, maybe 𝐆hold onto that last thing a little bit as we’ll come back to it lat♏er.
But you should largely forget about Nakamura the game dev, because the iconic horror artist has harboured a secret identity for years, an identity that has allowed her to sneak across the world as an ‘Urban Explorer’. A gasmask ensured both anonymity and infamy, and a talent for photographing abandoned buildings on numerous continents led to a successful blog. Ikumi Nakamura may have published the book , but it was made by her mysterious alter ego, Tommy.
UrbEx, simultaneously an abbreviation and a portmanteau (an abbrevmanteau, if you wi🍬ll), is short for urban exploration. While this could just mean ducking into an alley in your loca꧑l city centre that you’ve never noticed before, it more often means exploring abandoned buildings. Pripyat is a popular location for less radiation-fearing urban explorers, but you’ll often find people wandering disused warehouses, schools, and bunkers across the globe.
Nakamura’s project takes her across three continents: Asia, Europe, and North America. She’s clearly a seasoned veteran of the UrbEx scene, advising would-be adventurers to stay away from stagnant pools of water and cautioning against going too near white powder falling from ceilings. I don’t know if Tommy’s famed gas mask was functional, but it may have helped in particularly asbes🍬꧅tos-filled ruins.
Nakamura, or Tommy, or both, ex✃plores abandoned theatres and churches, but the most interesting photographs appear after she’s followed a trail of urban legends and local mysteries. The Island of Dolls in Mexico City could be straight out of one of her horror games, and Powerplant IM in Belgium could be a real-life Black Mesa facility. Nakamura only occasionally makes direct references to games themselves, but you can clearly see how her personal passion project has influenced the horror in her games.
Nakamura&r♛squo;s knack for sneaking through fences and evading security are tales recounted in the margins next to full-page photographs. Her thoughts on each subject🧔 range from the personal to the ideological, and add another layer of depth to the book. It was particularly interesting that many of the ‘abandoned’ buildings she explored in the US were temporarily occupied by homeless people, and she often found herself deleting photographs and rethinking her approach to certain buildings out of respect for the current occupants. Nakamura falls short of a political commentary on these subjects, but presents the facts along with photos of dilapidated ceilings and peeling paint, which is more than enough to paint a vivid picture of life in America for some.
The main attraction remains the photographs, however, and the huge hardback is the perfect vehicle for these glossy pictures, the double-page spreads of A4 photos complimenting the overwhelming siz💧e of the buildings Nakamura explores.
This isn’t just any coffee table book, however. Bo🧜und inside are three small zines, in which Nakamura takes a more casual tone and tells personal stories related to the places in that section o♔f the book. Complete with her own manga-style illustrations and matte paper (compared to the gloss of the rest of the book), these are wonderful additions that add a personal touch to proceedings. Whether it’s tales of near-misses with security or stories of her childhood, these Random Observations on Global Urban Exploration are the perfect foil to the more formally presented chapters.
Project UrbEx often takes on a different role to simply༺ documenting abandoned spaces. The photographs span decades of Nakamura’s hobby, and many of the buildings explored have since been demolished. In a way, Nakamura takes on the role of documentarian and preservationist in these instances. It’s vitally important to document these iconic places before they’re condemned, and Nakamura (or Tommy) unintentionally, successfully, takes on this role.
While it’s only natural that 50 percent of Project UrbEx is set in Nakamura’s home con♕tinent of Asia, I’d love to see a future sequel expand further. Africa, Australasia, and South America will all add their own unique flavours to her travels, and I’d be intrigu🌟ed to see what Nakamura’s keen eye for composition would find in the remnants of different cultures.
There’s always a voyeuristic aspect to UrbEx and the exploration of 🍌places you shouldn’t be in, and this goes twofold for those of us who live vicariously through YouTube videos or great hardback tomes. I’m not brave enough to venture to these precarious facilities myself, but I will read about Nakamura’s adventures with rapt attention. But if you came into this book expecting a video game treatise, you’d be disappointed. Despite brief mentions of Solid Snake and The Last of Us, this is far more a Tommy book than a Nakamura book.
NakamuraTommy can’t help but feel like an eponymous Stalker, hunting through ruins🐓 to survive.
However, that’s not to say Project UrbEx is completely divorced from Nakamura’s video game career. You can distinctly see the inspiration behind Ghostwire: Tokyo’s misty, supernatural streets in the Japanese locations. Her manga characters could be their own protagonists of their little zines. This could be the start of an UrbEx game. But it’d be better if it wasn’t. It’s fun to draw parallels between Nakamura’s exploration and her games, it’s interesting to see how she finds inspiration among Earth’s crumbling ruins, but it would almost ruin it all if it just became a game about UrbEx.
The point of this project is to get people outside, exploring, getting off the beaten path. You don’t have to trek to Pripyat (Nakamura doesn’t), but how about following your nose in your hometown? Go somewhere new. This is the real world, and it’s just as cool as the make-believe in video games. It would be a shame if this was reduced t♛o just being a game, it would feel antithetical to the point of the book. Be𝐆sides, Tommy doesn’t make video games.
