Did you know that in certain departments in France, water does not flow into the tap every day? This has been the case in Guadeloupe for several years, where residents suffer from untimely and recurring cuts or problems with the quality of the water distributed.
To denounce this lack of running water, Samora Curier, a Guadeloupean in his thirties, has been working for several months on the development of a video game, called “Water Rescue”. “I wanted to find a different way to approach this subject,” he explains. Known on social networks under the pseudonym Mwakasthe hopes through this to raise awareness among the general public, but also to make it an educational tool.
A constantly unstable network
“Water Rescue” is a puzzle game, that is to say a puzzle. The player embodies the character of Toupit’, a young Guadeloupean commissioned by the spirit of water, Manman Dlo, to repair the running water network and thus reconnect the population. So, at the first level of the game, the gamer must connect houses to water towers.
In the following levels, Samora and her team have surprises in store for you. For example, you will have to defeat monsters made of chlordecone – a pesticide used at the end of the 20th century in the banana plantations of Martinique and Guadeloupe, which poisoned a large part of the population – sent by the villain of the game, General Dézò͘d to attack the network. A way of illustrating one of “the realities of home”, explains Samora. “As it is an obsolete network, to which we put small bandages, we always need to repair a leak. There is a sempiternal side. We wanted to show that the network is never stable,” he adds.
A release planned for 2024
The video game will be released in 2024. To finance the project, the team launched on September 1 a crowdfunding campaign on the Ulule platform, which ends on October 6. They have so far raised more than 10,000 euros.
Guadeloupe is not the only French department to lack water. In Mayotte, a water crisis has persisted for several weeks amid drought and dysfunction in infrastructure management.