Weeping for strangers: The horror of David Lynch-infused I Did Not Buy This Ticket

I Did Not Buy This Ticket surprises players with its meditative exploration of the self entwined in character-driven psychological horror. Despite its relatively short play time, it manages to pack a powerful emotional punch.

With Tiago Rech as the author, and Lirio Ninotchka focused on illustrations, the team behind Ticket invites us on a trip where we get to meet Candelaria, a carpideira who travels from one funeral to another where she performs her job as a professional mourner. As we watch her cry for unknown faces, we also get to know more about her through what or whom for which she is keeping her true tears. She is a complex character and we get to dive into her psyche that takes many forms during her travels. 

To allow us to see Candelaria’s world through her journey, Tiago and Lirio had to choose the elements to make a game that would assist them in telling this story. As a visual novel, Ticket has the chance to tell the tales of ordinary people. In addition to this, all the visual elements in the game, from colors to the very characters we interact with, are there with the purpose of telling the story. To better understand the language employed in creating an intense emotional experience like Ticket, we chatted with Tiago and Lirio about the best seats on the bus to see the disturbing landscape made out of Candelaria’s feelings.

Soon we will be arriving at the Candelaria station

The story of Ticket takes us through weird and unexpected paths. But ultimately, it is still a story about a woman, Candelaria, who has no superpowers and is the protagonist of an extraordinarily common story. 

Tiago and Lirio left enough hints for us in the game to see Candelaria’s humanity amidst the bizarre roads we take with her. Candelaria wears Converse and she studies who her clients are before every funeral. Her job might be quite unusual, but she is a regular woman. As an artist who has worked in other games before, Tiago has sharpened his eyes to look for the extraordinary within the ordinary life of common people and he has the challenge of figuring out the means to tell their story. 

For Tiago, from narrative and visuals to mechanics, everything needs to be connected in a game in order to reinforce the themes he wants to work with. He told us that “visual novels as well as point-and-click games make tying the narrative with all the other layers that compose a game easier.” 

When it comes to creating a game where players can immerse into a character’s subjective dimension, designing it as a visual novel gives us more time to assess what is happening with the character as well as room to reflect upon it. Tiago Rech considers that these types of games invoke a type of physicality that adds to the experience since you can only explore the world of these games by scanning the screen with repetitive clicks. At the same time, whenever an important decision must be taken, it’s our hands that position the cursor over the option we think the character would choose. 

In Ticket, we learn about Candelaria’s feelings through the conversations between characters. But, as a visual novel, the game has the opportunity to tell more about the protagonist by giving us the chance to select her actions, and what she would say or do. While this mechanic is fairly common and used to provide players with the feeling of autonomy and authorship of the story, it can also portray the subjective position the character finds themselves in. If the list of actions represents all possible solutions for a problem based on what the character thinks about themselves and the world, what does it mean if all the options are the same? When Candelaria hears her phone ringing in the game, the only possibility of what to do is represented by a sequence of the same uppercased sentence “DON’T ANSWER THE PHONE”.

“Visual novels are interesting due to their capacity for exploring certain themes. If this was an action game, it would be impossible to have a carpideira as the main character. Justifying the ‘action’ aspect of the game with such a character would be extremely difficult,” explained Tiago. 

Through the position of a professional mourner, Ticket addresses sorrow, the process of grief, and how each person responds to the loss of a beloved person. In each of her gigs, Candelaria has the perspective of an outsider, someone free from any sort of emotional attachment to the deceased, allowing us to slowly reflect on the emotional response of the other characters. 

An important part of the creative process for Tiago is to have a deep understanding of the premise of a character. Once confident regarding who the character is, it becomes easier to tell players how the protagonist would act. As mechanics are employed to represent Candelaria’s subjectivity, the writing must make her a real person. Doing so allows situations like the one Tiago discussed with us. 

“I saw people saying they would act in the same way as Candelaria if they were in her shoes,” he said. “The options presented to players must make sense regarding who the character is. Because the character expresses herself in a realistic manner, players can see themselves in her.” 

The colors and shade of a Candelaria

The visual elements in a video game are extremely important to inform players about what is happening physically and emotionally to a character. Throughout history, the industry has established some conventions. To let us know that a character is in pain, in one way or another, a red aura appears on the screen or a life bar goes from green to red. They can also use sounds to represent what a character is feeling. They can utter their suffering with groans that we won’t stop hearing until they are healed. But as a character gains layers and grows in complexity, how can a game tell us about their deeper feelings regarding the world and themselves? 

To bring Candelaria’s emotions to life, Ticket uses visual elements, tracing back from artistic traditions which had the goal of showing what one was feeling instead of representing a realistic world. Lirio shared with us that one of the artistic decisions she took was to select a color palette that would reinforce Candelaria’s emotional state. According to her, “Candelaria is going through a lot, so I started thinking about how I could represent that in colors, not only in my drawings.” 

In the final product, much of the experience is marked by the usage of shades of eigengrau, the color which is supposedly seen by us when we close our eyes alongside vibrant hues of other colors. This combination reinforces the internal turmoil Candelaria is going through in a mix of strong emotions and the coping mechanism of shutting her eyes, ignoring the source of her pain. As players, we are conducted through the game not only by the dialogues and general narrative but also by the use of these colors. 

Eigengrau prevails over the other colors in most scenes, but there are some situations where a vibrant red seeps into the scene, coloring the clothes of central characters in the story, such as the Bus Driver and the Conductor. 

“While the shades of eigengrau reinforce the idea of having her eyes closed, the vibrant red works as their counterpoint – representing an internal discomfort related to strong and painful feelings,” Lirio explained.

As her first time working in a game, Lirio leaned into her strengths to create the world of Ticket.

 “My focus, as an artist, is on designing characters and I rarely work on scenarios,” said Lirio. Because of that, the scenarios in the game are simple, sometimes made of only a flat shade of eigengrau superimposed by an image to characterize the location. The real stars in every scene in the game are the characters, like the Bus Driver with his gaze and the Conductor, who vigilantly pushes Candelaria to ask questions she has been avoiding.

Representing the surrealistic internal world of Candelaria

I Did Not Buy This Ticket borrows surrealist language to tell Candelaria’s story, using as a reference the work of David Lynch. The world of Ticket is not dictated by logic but by emotions. That’s why we are given no answers regarding the origin of the ticket – which she didn’t buy – and Candelaria seems to simply accept the strangeness of the world around her. Building this weird personal universe was key to achieving the final result in Ticket.

First, by working together, Tiago and Lirio established the language needed to represent the unsettling feeling of not belonging that follows Candelaria. Tiago asked Lirio to use elements of collage, a technique based on mixing and combining images from different sources, in the game. By forcing heterogeneous elements into existing on the same screen, we have visual representations of the inconsistent world that Candelaria sees.

The collage makes the bus, in which Candelaria travels to funerals, feel like it’s floating in the station. Time seems to run differently when she is inside of it. Its weirdness is reinforced by the anachronism it invokes with a retro design. The other passengers are shapes without faces or faces within shapeless bodies. All these elements transform it into a nonplace which is always in movement, transporting those who belong nowhere. 

The bus is a character in itself, forcing encounters between Candelaria and other elements that move the story. When asked about the vehicle, Tiago told us that he “wanted to make the bathroom in the bus something similar to the safe room we find in Resident Evil games.”

Lirio considers that the place plays another role in the dynamic of the game. According to her, “the feeling of safety Candelaria finds inside the bathroom is false, but, by being there, she is forced to look at the mirror and look at herself.”

In the world of I Did Not Buy This Ticket, the mirror is a channel between the protagonist and herself. Every time she tries to escape from a weird situation, Candelaria goes to the bathroom, where there is the inescapable gaze of the mirror. By trying to feel safe and protected, Candelaria is forced to face who she has been ignoring: herself. The mirror in the bathroom is only one of the places where an accusatory gaze focuses on Candelaria. The Bus Driver and the Conductor – even during funerals – come with big, sometimes floating, eyes always watching her. 

By making Ticket a surrealistic aesthetic experience, Tiago and Lirio use a powerful tool to show us how lost Candelaria feels in the world. She is always traveling from one gig to another, without having a sense of belonging. The combination of collage, illogical situations, and weirdly allocated elements in each scene transports Candelaria’s feelings to the screen. 

The story of Candelaria is more than just a tale about a carpideira. It’s a trip into the personal universe of a person who is struggling with their own feelings while she is paid to weep for a loss only other people are really feeling. Making a game about such a unique character was possible due to Tiago’s and Lirio’s sensibility to translate feelings into dialogues, mechanics, and visual elements. 

I Did Not Buy This Ticket is available on the Epic Games Store.