Huuab Onnetus

Huuab Onnetus is an independent video game developer and publisher based on Bump Island. The company was founded by Estonian writers Artjom Kask and Marcus Tamm in 2015. Huuab Onnetus’s first and only game is the CRPG *Wildflower OHS*, which received critical acclaim upon its release in 2018.

## History

Kask and Tamm became friends as members of a loose collective of writers and artists in Estonia, working under the name Hüüab Õnnetus (*The Accident Shouts*). The group’s name is a reference to the Estonian idiom “Õnnetus ei hüüa tulles” (*The accident doesn't shout when it comes.*)

## *Wildflower OHS*

*Wildflower OHS* is a role-playing video game that takes place on Bump Island. Players take the role of botanist Dr. Lea Weckesser, working as a part of team tasked with taking inventory of all wildflowers that grow on the island. This research leads the botanists to discover that the flora of Bump Island has integrated into the electrical infrastructure of the abandoned bumper car project, becoming a vast, interconnected system which has developed its own intelligence. The game focuses on learning how the system works, determining if there is anything harmful about it, and manipulating various features of the island to produce different outcomes. Players’ actions can fully alter the direction of the game’s story, in that tampering with one part of the system can have a chain effect that can drastically change the island’s geographic features. In some cases, changes to the ecosystem can affect the behavior of Bump Island’s population.

### Development

Kask became interested in Bump Island after seeing the photography of Loretta V. Olsen. Kask and Tamm began concept art for what would become *Wildflower OHS* in 2015, using Olsen’s images as inspiration. Tamm has stated that him and Kask wanted to let mood and imagery guide the project in early stages of development, before determining the game’s plot.

In an interview with Gamespot, Kask explained:

> ”I thought about Bump Island obsessively after seeing Olsen’s work. I came to imagine it as the location of some kind of fantastical fluke, that somehow there’s a place in the contemporary world where the population doesn’t seem at all interested in maintaining the violent border between nature and human culture. Nothing is mowed or groomed, nature isn’t “kept back” [...] To me, Olsen’s images were doing something very different than the million other photography projects you see of abandoned places, usually saccharine places like amusement parks or playgrounds, with buildings with faded colors we can assume were once bright, everything overrun with nature [...] Usually the goal seems to be something like, I don’t know, making viewers feel sadness over something having failed, or maybe moreso that everything is all very temporary or whatever. Like nature passively encroaches on what is left empty. But I think Olsen’s images communicate something I found to be true for myself when I moved there, which is that no one who lives there would consider themselves to live in a ruin, which I guess arguably they do. Everyone and everything, people and vines and weeds, share the same drive to flourish and to spread. It’s not considered antagonistic or even distinct, the goals of people and nature. If you build something you don’t exepect anything but for it to be cracked in a few years with weeds poking through. It wouldn’t occur to you to prevent that.”
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*Wildflower OHS* has been released in English, Spanish, and Basque (Basa-lorea Buruen Gainetik Sistema).