Welcome to the land where true stories and tall tales combine!
Welcome to Elk is a biographical adventure game developed and published by Triple Topping and released for Steam on September 17, 2020 with releases later following for Xbox One and Nintendo Switch.You play as Frigg, a young carpenter trading their busy life in the city for an apprenticeship in a small town. When she arrives in Elk, Frigg worries that the slower pace of life will be boring (they don’t even have the internet), but quickly discovers nothing could be further from the truth!
Welcome to Elk is a game full of stories, sometimes about humor, other times about love. Frigg is an outsider to this world but soon learns that only assisting other characters through minigames and learning about their life stories can truly help her make new friends.
This game provides examples of:
- Bland-Name Product: At the start of the game, Frigg's phone is full of fake apps with names close to the real-life counterparts including Facelook, MeTube, and Tick Tock.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: The game's creators appear sometimes in behind-the-scenes videos talking about a story in that portion of the game.
- Creator Cameo: The story is occasionally interrupted by live-action cutscenes from the game's developers talking about the real-life story that inspired that part of the game.
- Dream Episode: The in-game dreams are fully interactable just like the real-life daytime world of the game.
- In-Universe Game Clock: Each act of the game's story is divided into two halves, day and night. Frigg ventures around the island during the day helping others, but eventually at night she must go to sleep and interact with dreams.
- Mind Screw: There are multiple indications that Elk is SERIOUSLY not what it seems. What's the significance of the opening scene with the traveling Anders (and why does it return in the ending)? Why does, as he mentions during his first meeting with Frigg, does Anders feel like he's died many times before? Why do bottles containing alternate versions of stories and events Frigg experiences appear in her home? What's the deal with the old video game about Elk? Is the Nifflas game Ynglet seriously real? Why did Frigg hear something that sounded suspiciously like a gamedev meeting about something she'd just experienced? What's with the strange things about stories everyone can say to her when she goes off to find Anders? How is Anders' afterlife pub real? And... did Frigg just walk out of the entire GAME?
- Mind Screwdriver: The ending, in one fell fourth-wall-annihilating swoop, effortlessly explains all the bizarre weirdness of Elk: it's a story. Specifically, a story about stories, concluding with Frigg's discovery that she's in one. The old Elk game is a reference to an old project that inspired the game. And Anders? The poor sweet guy dies every time he dies in a telling of a story about him. At the start he's traveling into Welcome to Elk, and in the end, he's traveling to the next telling of a story about him.
- Minigame Game: Most of the gameplay consists of interacting with other characters, but you occasionally need to help them by playing a minigame.
- Real Life Writes the Plot: Every one of the in-game stories are based on real-life stories the game's developers had heard.
- We Interrupt This Program: A rare non-television and non-news example comes in the form of the developer interviews.
