The Lunch Punch Power Hour in Conference Room 4: Fun and refreshingly anarchic, but more valiant revolt than workplace revolution
Peacock stage, Abbey Theatre, Dublin
★★★☆☆
Set in the sterile, fluorescent-lit vacuum that is the office of an anonymous Irish fund-management firm, The Lunch Punch Power Hour in Conference Room 4 is a new play by Caitríona Daly that explores the absurdity of corporate life with humour and chaos. Ronán Duffy's design perfectly captures that nowhere aesthetic: cool-toned, clean and soulless. The details are crushingly well observed: unopened water bottles, swivel chairs and token charity teddy bears.
Three employees are locked in Conference Room 4 during lunch to decide how to spend the company's annual corporate social-responsibility budget. Ambitious Clodagh (Caoimhe O'Malley) and rural outsider Daniel (Fionn Foley) are unexpectedly joined by Jess (Emma Dargan-Reid), a new receptionist pulled in under the false pretence of a team-building exercise.
What unfolds in Raymond Keane's production is a descent into role-play and theatrical mayhem as they audition proposals, from saving the bees to sponsoring a GAA club in Offaly, in a half-baked gameshow-style competition. Meanwhile, a frenzied HR rep, Susan (Helen Norton), makes comic attempts to regain control.
The play skewers the hollowness of corporate ethics, presenting them as less about morality than about optics. When Jess suggests directing funds toward more urgent causes – medical aid for Gaza, domestic-abuse services, poverty relief – she's met with deflection. Clodagh briskly explains that the company has a Tel Aviv office, the chief executive has an abuse conviction and giving money to poor people would draw too much media scrutiny.
READ MORE
The Lunch Punch Power Hour in Conference Room 4: Fionn Foley, Emma Dargan-Reid and Caoimhe O'Malley. Photograph: Rich Davenport
The Lunch Punch Power Hour in Conference Room 4: Emma Dargan-Reid as Jess. Photograph: Rich Davenport
The Lunch Punch Power Hour in Conference Room 4: Fionn Foley as Daniel. Photograph: Rich Davenport
At this point, Jess, depicted as a caricature of a left-wing millennial, erupts in unconvincing rage. Even if she didn't know the specifics of the company's shady dealings, her shock feels disingenuous. We live in a world where corporate evil is no longer surprising but regarded with quiet, beaten-down apathy and irony.
A more compelling play might have explored why the real-life Jess might have known all this and taken the job anyway. Our collective resignation, not outrage, is the more urgent moral dilemma.
The play's structure, alternating wild improvisation with moments of emotional honesty, is both its strength and its flaw. There's real energy in the madness: Daniel dons a princess dress and peroxide wig to play a Trump-supporting southern belle named Tiffany; Clodagh transforms into a brittle talkshow host in sunglasses and a feather boa. There's military cosplay, Mario Kart references and layers of silliness.
None of it needs to make sense: it's driven by the Bacchic release of characters seeking escape from soul-crushing monotony. The performances are uniformly strong, and the sense of play is genuine.
Still, the production's loose form eventually undercuts its themes. It builds to a climax that offers no explanations, only an unnecessary burst of metatheatre and a choreographed dance to Tame Impala. Why Tame Impala? A giddy embrace of the meaninglessness we now inhabit? It borders on the hysterical, a distraction from the questions the play raises but can't resolve.
The Lunch Punch Power Hour in Conference Room 4 is fun and refreshingly anarchic. But its wildness, its best and most unusual quality, is also its undoing. A valiant, messy, entertaining lunchtime revolt, but not a revolution.
The Lunch Punch Power Hour in Conference Room 4 is at the
Abbey Theatre
, Dublin, until Saturday, September 6th
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Times
4 minutes ago
- Irish Times
Have we no more active rights over life, birth and death?
Stephanie O'Connor, a research officer at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, was awarded this year's Hubert Butler Essay Prize in the Parade Tower of Kilkenny Castle on Saturday. John Banville, honorary patron of the prize, said: 'With courage, clarity and subtle discrimination, Stephanie O'Connor addresses fundamental questions that arise, as she writes, 'at the edges of human life', and presents an argument that affirms the dignity and respect that are due to all of us no less in the process of our 'going hence' than at the moment of our 'coming hither'.' This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Hubert Butler's first essay collection, Escape from the Anthill , which appeared in 1985- the author's 86th year. It was also the first production from Antony Farrell's Lilliput Press. The essay prize, brainchild of Jeremy O'Sullivan, was founded seven years ago and is now an integral part of the Kilkenny Arts Festival. READ MORE This year's essay theme was the question of how far we can and should control our destinies over lif birth and death, instancing Edgar's stoical monition to his despairing father Gloucester in King Lear : 'Men must endure/Their going hence, even as their coming hither.' Historian Roy Foster, who judged the prize with Catriona Crowe, Nicky Grene and Barbara Schwepcke, said the winning essay 'went straight to the point of asking whether we were any the wiser for the increased options available in an age of reproductive technology and end-of-life planning. 'Stephanie O'Connor concentrated on the legal and moral ethics of keeping a brain-dead woman on life-support for the sake of an unborn infant who will almost certainly not survive. She discusses with compassion and empathy the 'uncanny ambiguity where the dead might remain legally ambiguous', and incisively states the need for 'a new ethical framework, shaped by legislation and public debate': medical ethics being 'the scaffolding by which we try to uphold the human spirit in a world increasingly seduced by the procedural and drawn to the utilitarian'. 'The clarity with which she addresses issues described rightly as intimate and harrowing is deeply impressive, and her definition of 'dignity' as a guiding principle strikes a powerful concluding note.' The winning essay is reproduced below. Have we no more active rights over life, birth and death? ' Men must endure / Their going hence, even as their coming hither .' So speaks Edgar to his blind and broken father, Gloucester, in William Shakespeare's King Lear (Act V, Scene 2), reaching for some scrap of consolation amid the wreckage of betrayal, madness, and loss. It is a fantastic line. It is a fatalistic line. This is not hope. His words carry the chill of stoic resignation, a frail attempt to impose meaning on the brute finality of death, a comfort as thin as the wind on the Cliffs of Moher. To accept that birth and death lie beyond our control. I recently witnessed the death of someone I loved very deeply – a moment of quiet surrender, beyond my control, that left an unfathomable gulf in my life. I desperately wanted them to live, and yet, to be there, as they let go, quietly, peacefully, after years of the struggle with ill health, was a profound and beautiful privilege. In that stillness, death felt less like a rupture and more like a final act of grace. And yet, even after witnessing what is called a ' good death ' – peaceful, dignified, and free from suffering – I find myself questioning whether Edgar's words still hold true. Can we really, in our modern world, still accept that we must simply endure our coming and going? In an age of reproductive technology and end-of-life planning, it would appear we have long since moved into an era where such a fatalistic acceptance of our helpless arrival and helpless departure is no longer passive, but shaped by choice, by law, and by technology. The question is: are we wiser for it? I find I cannot consider the question of our active rights over life, birth and death without revisiting the harrowing case of P.P. v. Health Service Executive (2014) , a case that personally gripped me, and I suspect many others, and would echo through Irish legal and ethical discourse for years to come, making me wonder: What if Edgar's lines are no longer merely literary, but legal? What if, in our era, death itself must await constitutional interpretation? And what if the body, in its going hence, becomes hostage to a cause it never chose? In December of that year, a young Irish woman, only 26 years old – daughter, partner, and mother of two – suffered a catastrophic brain injury and was declared clinically dead. She was 14 weeks pregnant at the time. Her heartbroken family, already reeling from the suddenness and irreversibility of her passing, was told that her body would be kept on life support – not for her sake, but to prolong the gestation of her unborn child. For three weeks, the young woman's dead body remained tethered to the apparatus of somatic support, sustained artificially in a state of biological animation, while the medical team monitored the foetus in her abdomen – her heart mechanically pulsing, her organs perfused. Eventually, the High Court permitted what her distressed loved ones had requested from the outset: that the machines be stopped because the woman was dead, and that the treatment was ' unreasonable ', ' experimental ' and therefore unethical. There was, the court found, no realistic prospect that the unborn child would survive, and ' in the best interest of the unborn child ' authorised the withdrawal of ongoing somatic support. She could be allowed, at last, in that long-honoured phrase, to rest in peace. It is worth pausing to consider how we arrived at a point where such a scenario was not only conceivable, but could unfold in reality, and be upheld in law. The answer, in large part, lies in the legacy of Ireland's constitutional recognition of the unborn's right to life. The now-repealed Eighth Amendment, inserted in 1983, was shaped not only by theological conviction but by the moral anxieties of a devout society. It created a legal equivalence between the lives of women and their unborn, and in doing so, an uncanny ambiguity, where the dead might remain legally ambiguous: both people and legally bound vessels burdened by gestational obligations. In practice, creating situations such as P.P. v HSE , where legal obligations forced doctors to override death itself in the interest of potential life. Its repeal, in 2018, returned legislative authority to the Oireachtas, allowing for a new ethical framework shaped by legislation and public debate. However, while progress has been made, the fundamental legal and ethical dilemmas at the heart of P.P. v. HSE remain unsettled, leaving open the possibility that such tragic circumstances could arise again. In a searing editorial at the time, the woman was referred to as a ' cadaveric incubator .' The term is terrible, and its honesty is unmerciful. For what else, legally speaking, was she during those weeks? She was no longer a citizen. No longer a patient. No longer capable of consent. She had become, by a certain line of reasoning, a resource, one whose utility had not yet expired. And yet: this young woman had been someone. Someone who had made choices, who had loves and fears, and who might have left an advance directive had she ever imagined such a grim fate. Her family's grief was compounded not only by her loss but by the State's intrusion into what should have been a sacred and private time of reckoning with death. It brought into sharp focus ethical questions that, while deeply significant, are often approached with caution or even skirted in public discourse – What is life? Who owns death? Who decides its terms? And does the unborn's fragile spark of potential outweigh the dignity owed to the dead? The High Court, to its credit, ruled with sobriety and deference to expert medical consensus that there was no reasonable prospect that the foetus would survive to viability. But it still took weeks of judicial intervention to affirm that a woman who was clinically dead should not be subjected to experimental prolongation. I revisit the case here not to reopen wounds, and indeed, I thought long and hard, hesitant to write at all out of deference to those who lived its reality. But then I recalled something Hubert Butler once said of another historical silence, when atrocities in Yugoslavia went unmentioned because naming them would mean naming our own complicity: '.. silence did not help me ... It became increasingly difficult to be silent .' And so, it is here. We must speak with clarity and compassion about where medicine, law, and human dignity intersect – and where they diverge. In this instance, we were forced to ask ourselves whether a dead woman could be called upon to continue a pregnancy she could no longer consent to, whether she could, as some bioethicists starkly put it, ' be used '. The question was no longer whether the unborn had rights; instead, it was whether the dead had any rights left? It is important to stress here that no argument was presented to diminish the moral status of the unborn. Rather, the arguments were made to try to assert the indivisible dignity and bodily integrity of the already lived life, and the rights of families to mourn without being conscripted into bioethical theatre. In cases such as this, when all evidence points to futility, continuing life support is no longer an act of care – it is an act of fear, driven by legal shadows, not moral light. And it seems, we are no longer mere witnesses to birth and death; we are, increasingly, their stewards. Modern medicine has given us powers that previous generations could never have imagined – the ability to keep bodies functioning after the mind is gone, after death, to intervene in birth and delay death. But these powers have brought with them difficult questions: just because we can act, does it mean we should? In cases such as P.P. v HSE , where a woman declared clinically dead was kept on somatic support for the sake of her unborn child who has no chance of survival, and against her family's wishes, we see how the boundaries between life, death, and duty blur and just how complicated these questions can become. When we ask if we have no more active rights over life, birth and death, but instead are forced to confront the clash between medical possibility, legal obligation, and human dignity. Is this not best answered by opposing principles, but by turning toward the moral terrain where those principles collide: a space requiring not only legal interpretation, but imagination, conscience, and care. This is not a simple clash between religion and secularism, or between tradition and progress. Nor is this tragic paradox in any way confined to Ireland. This case is only one of a number of rare, tragic, high-profile, and contentious medico-legal cases, which have gone before courts around the world in recent years. Some are cases where pregnant women, have been clinically diagnosed as brain-dead but are kept ' alive ' artificially, to preserve the life of the unborn until such time that a Caesarean section can be carried out. In such cases of maternal-foetal conflict , the pregnant woman's interests conflict with the interests of the foetus because clearly, to allow the mother's death would result in the unborn dying because its intensive care support would be withdrawn. Again, I stress that what I write here is in no way a debate about the moral status of the foetus, nor a contest between the right to life and the right to die. It is, instead, an attempt to consider how we act when the old moral frameworks no longer fit – and how we honour the living and the dead when the answers aren't written down. For while P.P. v HSE may bear the peculiar imprimatur of our constitutional and religious legacy, the underlying conflict is something more intimate and harrowing – between technological capacity and moral restraint – the redefinition of the human identity in an age of technical possibility. And across Europe and beyond, similar cases have arisen to highlight the global resonance of these issues and underscore the universality of the dilemma: the collision between medical capability and moral uncertainty, between the language of law and the needs of grief. Instances where medical possibility outpaces ethical consensus, and where law, unsure of its footing, stumbles into the most private regions of life and death. In Texas, the high-profile case of Marlise Muñoz in 2013 echoed with chilling familiarity: a brain-dead woman, pregnant, was kept on life support against her family's wishes due to state laws protecting the unborn. In Germany, the debate continues over how to balance prenatal life with posthumous dignity in the absence of explicit legal directives. Even in secular France, the Vincent Lambert case in 2019, though not involving pregnancy, laid bare the painful entanglements of familial love, legal ambiguity, and medical endurance. These are not the accidents of jurisdiction, but the growing pains of a civilisation increasingly unsure how to interpret the sacred in the age of the mechanical. The principles of medical ethics – autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice – known collectively as the Beauchamp and Childress framework, form the quiet architecture by which medicine seeks to balance power with compassion, and are not merely philosophical ornaments. They are the scaffolding by which we try to uphold the human spirit in a world increasingly seduced by the procedural and drawn to the utilitarian. Each principle carries distinct weight and, when in tension, reveals the intricacy of end-of-life decision-making: Respect for autonomy, in the context of P.P. vs HSE , becomes paradoxical. It affirms the individual's right to have meaningful agency and moral authority over the most fundamental aspects of their existence – how they are born, how they live, and how they die. This includes making decisions about their own body and life, including the choice to refuse life-prolonging treatment or to seek medically assisted death. It means honouring a competent person's wish to die with dignity, even when that wish contradicts societal norms or professional instincts to preserve life using systems that neither knew us nor will mourn us. But the dead have no will – they once had one. Is it beyond our moral imagination to give it voice and let it be heard? Interest Theory allows for the possibility of posthumous rights, including, for example, the right to have one's remains treated with dignity, the right to have one's wishes regarding burial or cremation respected, or the right to protect one's reputation from posthumous defamation. But in the age of technology, has society chosen to limit the principle of posthumous autonomy and posthumous moral and legal rights? The right to die a natural death is supported by the right to respect for autonomy. But many states, including Ireland, invalidate a woman's advance directive if she is pregnant because of the compelling legal right to life of the foetus. Often, irrespective of whether the woman's wishes are known or not, courts will use a best interests test or substituted judgment standard. Some will argue, understandably, that beneficence – our duty to do good – extends most urgently to the vulnerable unborn. But beneficence, if severed from context, becomes blind and can even lead to tyranny. In trying to preserve a hypothetical life, we may violate an actual death. In doing so, we may dishonour both. Regarding non-maleficence, a dead person experiences no physical harm from continued somatic support because they are dead. However, if we consider posthumous rights, it could be argued that somatic support of a decomposing dead body potentially violates the cultural norms of dignity and respect that society confers to dead human bodies. Regarding the principle of (social) justice, intensive somatic support is expensive and it is arguable that the State should not direct such limited resources, for an indefinite time to the care of one dead individual, even when balanced against the costs of caring for a baby for a prolonged time in a neonatal intensive unit care if gestation were not delayed to allow the foetus to mature further in utero. When making decisions, particularly in situations involving maternal-foetal conflict, doctors must balance these ethical principles with professional practice guidelines and responsibilities under the law. But in navigating, we encounter the limits of law in matters that are deeply human. The law may compel action, but there are moments when law, though meticulously reasoned, proves insufficient to capture the full scope of human experience or embody compassion. Yes, legality can codify duties, define rights, and offer structure to our moral instincts. Still, even the most carefully constructed legal frameworks cannot fully account for love, grief, or the emotional, ethical, moral and familial complexity of life-and-death decisions, let alone the unspoken complexities that shape human lives. In cases like P.P. v HSE , and many others, the boundaries of law meet the raw edge of human sorrow. What follows is not merely a legal question but an ethical reckoning with what it means to honour the dead, to protect the unborn, and to listen to the quiet dignity of those who mourn. And where competing rights, such as the sanctity of life or the rights of the unborn, are applied as absolutes, is it possible that they can obscure more than they resolve, especially when they collide with the dignity owed to the dead? It raises the question – when we cling to principles too tightly, do we risk losing sight of the person? As Hubert Butler observed, ' Science has enormously extended the sphere of our responsibilities, while our consciences have remained the same size .' In an age where the dead can be biologically sustained long after meaning has ebbed away, the question is not just what we can do, but what we should do – and why. Is there a point at which the machinery of law must yield to the compassion of humanity, where rigid adherence gives way to moral judgment grounded not in statutes, but in empathy, respect, and care? It is in this space – between what the law allows and what decency demands – that our truest responsibilities begin. Dignity is an elusive but crucial concept. It's not simply the absence of suffering, nor merely the preservation of respect for autonomy. Dignity might serve as a middle path – a humane principle in the absence of consensus, reminding us that medicine is not only a technical craft but also a humane one. In the bleak world of King Lear , mortal lives are at the mercy of fate and indifferent, as Shakespeare's characters are cast from birth to death with little control, their will overwhelmed by storm, folly, despair and madness. Today, medical ethics, biotechnology, and law offer tools that challenge this fatalism. Edgar's stoic call to ' endure ' in King Lear was a balm for despair, but in our modern context, endurance is no longer passive. It is curated, legislated, and medicalised. When endurance means tethering a dead woman to machines for weeks against her family's wishes, it is no longer stoicism – it becomes imposition. In this, perhaps, Edgar's words still hold – not as a declaration of helplessness, but stripped of its fatalism, it becomes a call to humanity. A reminder of the deep humility required at the edges of human life. Yes, men must endure their going hence – but not in silence, not without dignity, and not without the right to be mourned as more than a vessel. Whether we are choosing to end treatment, to intervene in birth, or to withhold the breath of a machine, we are not gods. Our agency is real, but it is bounded by mortality, by ethics, and by love. Yes, men must endure their going hence. But we, the living, must also ensure they may go in peace.
Irish Times
3 hours ago
- Irish Times
Sale of development land sinks in second quarter
The housing crisis remains an ever present fixture in the headlines this morning as a new report from Ireland's largest estate agent shows the sale of land for development in the Greater Dublin Area and the regional centres of Cork, Galway, and Limerick sank to its lowest level in more than two years in the second quarter. The report suggested policies announced by the Government over that period to address the housing crisis are likely to have delayed decision-making and stalled activity as stakeholders take time to digest how things are likely to pan out. In Q&A , Dominic Coyle stresses the importance of drawing up a will as he deals with a query from a parent on how they can pass on a share in their son's apartment to his bereaved partner in a tax efficient manner following his unexpected death. 'Regular readers will be familiar with my view on wills and their importance,' he says. 'I sense that most people have the view that even to entertain the notion of drawing up a will is almost like putting one foot in the coffin but it's not.' READ MORE Budget retailer Lidl and its famed middle isle has fast become a favourite of Irish shoppers. From inflatable pools to chainsaws, you never know what might find there. But few Irish shoppers know how the chain secures its flow of weekly special offers: with its own shipping company. Derek Scally has the background story of one of Germany's most successful brands. Actor Don Wycherley is the narrator for Guy Barker's Soho Symphony in the RTÉ Concert Orchestra's concert, A Night in Soho, on Friday at the National Concert Hall, Dublin. He tells Tony Clayton-Lea how he got burned by Eircom shares in 1999 in Me and My Money , putting him off shares for life. Over decades, Ireland has invested heavily in education, and now has one of the highest shares of the population in the world who are graduates. This is a fundamental driver of our high standard of living. In his column this week, John Fitzgerald tells how foreign multinationals operating here would not be on our shores without our highly-educated workforce. In other news, new data from jobs platform Indeed suggests jobseekers have significantly lost interest in both academic and trade roles over the past year, with the advance of artificial intelligence leading people to seek out more tech-facing roles. In this week's opinion piece , Fine Grain Property chief executive Colin MacDonald runs his eye over the recent announcement of the largest capital investment programme in the history of the State: the €275.4 billion National Development Plan. He argues the moment presents an opportunity for Ireland to renew its commitment to the partnership between public vision and private enterprise. Electric carmaker Tesla has pledged to award its leader Elon Musk some 96 million Tesla shares in two years, if he stays put for five. The shares would be worth about $30 billion to the tech mogul. Stocktake mulls the market reaction to the news. If you'd like to read more about the issues that affect your finances try signing up to On the Money , the weekly newsletter from our personal finance team, which will be issued every Friday to Irish Times subscribers.
Irish Independent
3 hours ago
- Irish Independent
Hollywood horror specialist has eyes on Dublin as Irish developer Gambrinous readies new game based in infamous Hellfire Club
It's no use just having a smart design, you'd better also spin a compelling story around it or cook up an association with a celebrity – failing that, how about a deal with a major Hollywood production company? Dublin-based indie studio Gambrinous has by accident or design come up with a combination of all the above for its upcoming release, Eyes of Hellfire, out later this month on PC in Early Access. Despite two successful titles under its belt since Colm Larkin and his pal Fred Mangan set up Gambrinous in 2014, the studio struggled to get its next game off the ground. A couple of years working on one project came to naught before they hit on a devilishly clever concept with a haunting art style inspired by 19th-century painter Goya. With a back catalogue of lighthearted fare, Gambrinous turned to a darker idea dreamed up by art director Mangan and studio writer Len Cunningham, who are both huge fans of horror. Originally called just Hellfire Club – after the infamous Dublin Mountains hunting lodge overlooking the city – the game would be a new departure for the small team, which at that time in 2023 was just five people. 'Their pitch was exploring a supernatural space based on the actual old ruins just outside Dublin, where real life people come together and are dragged into something supernatural,' explains studio head Larkin during an interview alongside Mangan at the Irish Independent offices last week. 'Eyes of Hellfire is a co-op Gothic horror experience for you and your friends where not all is as it seems, especially your friendships. So what happens there is you're playing together, it's kind of like, Escape the Haunted House or an escape room. 'But we're causing a little friction between the players, so we seed each person with a curse, and that is kind of like a private agenda that you have to solve. You play a session together with, say, four or five people for a couple of hours. And in that time frame, you're really trying to do stuff together, but you privately are trying to sort of get away with something or solve something without people knowing.' If it sounds a little like breakout hit game Among Hit or TV's The Traitors, you're not wrong. But both those of can also trace at least some of their DNA to older social deduction card games such as Werewolf. Having worked up a prototype – Gambrinous used a mixture of old-school paper-based models and software versions in Tabletop Simulator – they began shopping the idea around to publishers. The results weren't exactly pretty. Larkin reckons they made more than 100 pitches and got rejection letters to most of them. But perhaps the longest shot eventually paid off handsomely. For 25 years, LA-based Blumhouse Productions has followed the Roger Corman blueprint of low-budget but creative horror flicks, including Five Nights at Freddy's and The Purge. But in 2023 they decided to get into games, albeit in a low-profile way. 'They'd gone out and said, we're Blumhouse Games and we're publishing horror games,' says Larkin. 'But they hadn't announced a single game. So they were scouting, signing games quietly and they weren't actually that easy to reach. In the end, I got through to them through a fairly senior connection I had made over the years in the industry. 'We'd already spent quite a few months trying to pitch many publishers on Eyes of Hellfire. And I think part of the problems we had with it was a bit too many elements to understand. It was like fusing tabletop or board games with horror, with live action, with suspicion-based co-op. Publishers want hits, but they're often a bit worried about novelty' Mangan jumps in to elaborate: 'The standard publisher might look and say we want a horror game rather than we want a slate of horror games. So the fact that it's a horror game with the board game stuff and the co-op stuff – I guess it's a riskier decision for them. Whereas Blumhouse, with horror as a genre locked in, they're looking for interesting things within that umbrella.' Larkin agrees that's the reason they went with Blumhouse in the end: 'It was straight up a good match where it was an ill-fit elsewhere. We always try and make games that are novel in some way, maybe sometimes too many ways. But we're always looking for something that we think there is a market for.' Sadly for Gambrinous, negotiating the publishing deal didn't involve flying out to LA and being wined and dined – the whole thing was handled remotely. The funding from Blumhouse secured in early 2024 was substantial – Larkin politely declines to put a figure on it – but it meant the studio could then knuckle down and put Eyes of Hellfire into full production by expanding the staffing to nine people. The set-up of the story is that the players arrive separately to the haunted lodge only to discover they are trapped and must work together to explore and escape. Players can roam freely around the rooms but there are elements of turn-based strategy to perform tasks governed by a stock of action points. As the team explored the framing of the narrative, they realised they'd need a character besides the players and the supernatural enemies to ratchet up the tension. Initially, the Host featured only in the introduction but then they cast a little-known actor named Liam Cunningham and the results were just too good to limit him to the start. Cunningham, as you might guess, is related to studio writer Len but is, of course better known as Davos Seaworth in Game of Thrones, among many other fine roles. Family connections aside, he's also a massive games fan and had previously contributed to Gambrinous's previous release, Cardpocalypse. The Host as voiced by Cunningham is a ghostly, enigmatic character whose motives are completely suspect. 'You're never fighting him,' says Larkin. 'He's never a villain. He's never an antagonist. He's always there messing with you. A presence is a really good way of thinking of him.' It's not just the full Irish voice cast that gives Eyes of Hellfire its flavour, Mangan's art and Gary Keane's subtle soundtrack contribute to the air of dread pervading the lodge. Mangan did a lot of research into Gothic romance stories of the 18th century: 'We pulled in a lot of Mary Shelley, Byron and Bram Stoker, who's a local boy. Even Oscar Wilde – there's a few kind of Dorian Gray moments in the game. 'With that in mind, we've looked at a similar period for the art style. So probably the biggest influence for me is Francisco Goya, the romance painter. He did it a series called The Black Paintings, where he was in the depth of illness at the time. It was particularly horrific stuff – very low light and with intense blacks. A classic horror thing. 'The story itself is based on five modern-day characters who are in some way linked to their descendants in the house itself. And they're suffering illness, and that's the basis of the curse that's kind of driven them to meet as strangers in the house, which lends itself quite nicely to the suspicion co-op. 'You don't really know each other. You've ended up in the house and they're dragged back then in the opening of the game to the period piece in the house.' Players won't have to wait much longer to get their hands on Eyes of Hellfire but Gambrinous has also chosen to launch into Early Access at a lower price rather than with a fully complete release. That enables the studio to continue to develop the game with player feedback – potentially for up to a year before the final polished product ships. Larkin says Early Access has become a common way for studios to get their games finished – it brings in money, lets fans contribute their ideas and builds a community of players who evangelise to others. 'It's become a player invitation to join in co-development of the game. So you say, yes, this is a fun experience, you can do all this. 'We're saying, come and join us now. You do buy the game, but you're buying into more development. You're going to get the full finished game for free, essentially, or with your purchase over time. 'That's what the early access idea is. It's been very successful for some games and for some communities that build up around a game early on. Because you can jump in on day one of an Early Access game, play an incomplete version of the game, but still good, like the bar is really high. It's still a very polished and playable experience.' The Early Access version goes live on Steam August 27 for €9 for a limited time. Cleverly, Gambrinous has ensured that every copy sold can host a game for up to four other players, who won't pay a cent – easing the process of persuading pals to give Eyes of Hellfire a go. 'I think that's going to really help us on launch where we have some champions who are really into it and they'll convince their friends and that big barrier is now gone,' says Larkin.
