Playing Hell with Dorian Gray in Indie Video Games: Queer Katabasis and Gothic Parody in ‘The Secret Life of Dorian Pink’

Solo-developed by Malaysian designer and illustrator AmberLimShin, ‘The Secret Life of Dorian Pink’ (2023) is an indie single-player choices-matter role-playing game that rewrites Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ (1891). Set in an alternate universe where both Dorian and Basil are still alive, the game begins with an aged Dorian proposing to a visibly younger and prettier Basil. Upon agreeing to marry Dorian, however, Basil is kidnapped by the Devil, who needs ‘Delicious Basil’ for his next infernal ‘FEASTIVAL’. In an attempt to rescue his fiancé, Dorian goes to Hell by jumping into ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ in his living room. As Dorian (the only playable character) will soon realise, the unashamedly weird version of the underworld that he has to navigate if he wants to rescue his lover is populated by a host of equally bizarre characters, including both old acquaintances of Dorian’s and entirely new creatures, such as the Crooks or Killer Clown. My paper proposes to explore Dorian Pink’s queer katabasis and all its possible narrative outcomes, focussing on Dorian’s interaction with the several characters adapted from Wilde’s novel and highlighting the curious twists that these are given in the game. My analysis of the complex relationship that ‘Dorian Pink’ establishes with its Victorian source text will also pay due attention to the creative strategies adopted by AmberLimShin to appropriate and transform the queer and Gothic dimensions of Wilde’s ‘Dorian Gray’ within a game that ultimately favours queerness and humour over horror. In so doing, I aim to offer a detailed account of the intriguing ways in which ‘Dorian Gray’ is ‘repainted’ in brighter colours all over the playful underworld of ‘Dorian Pink’