Dream of Darkness

You’ve endured a violent massacre, but now you’re trapped between an invading foreign army and a powerful god.

What would you do?

This is the challenge posed by the horror game Dream of Darkness, where players assume the role of Marina—a character based on La Malinche, a real-life Indigenous Nahua woman, enslaved by the Spanish, who worked as an interpreter for the conquistador Hernán Cortés during the early 16th century.

The video game, still in development, is set in the immediate aftermath of the Toxcatl massacre, which took place in what is today Mexico City. In the game, Marina—a complicated figure both revered and reviled for centuries—is held hostage by Tezcatlipoca, the Aztec god of both creation and destruction. What can she do to survive?

To create Dream of Darkness, Javier Rayón is conducting extensive research with historical sources like the Florentine Codex, the encyclopedic 16th-century manuscript that includes the account of the conquest of Mexico told from the perspective of the Indigenous Nahuas. Now, with the Florentine Codex newly digitized by Getty—sections easily searchable and fresh translations added—artists and researchers like Rayón can experience the book’s trove of knowledge from anywhere in the world.

As the narrative designer responsible for the game’s story, Rayón is working with a global team of artists, voice actors, designers, and animators from Mexico, the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, Romania, Finland, Nigeria, India, and Papua New Guinea. With his research-intensive process, Rayón wants to depict rich, complex characters while avoiding harmful stereotypes. “Our characters are not the usual male dudes destroying everything,” he says.

Rayón, who lives in Mexico City, first turned to video games to create positive change. As a young person, he had wanted to work in international relations but soon changed his mind after a trip to the European Parliament. “One of the members of Parliament explained to us visiting students that no matter how good your idea or solution, your power relies on the support of the people you represent,” he says. “So I decided that I would make games in order to better inform the public.” Eventually he founded his own video game startup, Jaguar Games.

Dream of Darkness is constantly evolving as Rayón incorporates feedback from modern-day Nahua communities. “I’m constantly saying: ‘Hey, we’re going to have this character. What opportunities do you see?’ We’re not trying to create a documentary, but we try to make it authentic with what Nahua people tell us, while also finding what resonates with today’s players.” After searching for over a year, he recruited Alberto Zeferino, who grew up speaking Nahuatl in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, as a voice actor for the game and cultural advocate.

Zeferino found out about the job opportunity while scrolling through social media one day. He was interested in representations of Mesoamerican culture, and his feed was mostly Indigenous content. But beyond playing characters in community festivals, he had never acted before.

Typically, Zeferino is disappointed by how Nahuatl dialogue is represented in popular culture. When the language is used, he says, it’s often “meaningless gibberish” or the pronunciation is wrong. Acting in the game was not only a chance to get the language right but also to create a positive representation of a culture that for much of Mexico’s history has been actively suppressed.

In many Indigenous communities in Mexico, Zeferino says, the languages are endangered. As a young person, he would reply in Spanish when his parents and grandparents spoke to him in Nahuatl. Some parents, he says, don’t teach their children Nahuatl for fear of discrimination. And today, while the language is more commonly taught in Mexican schools, the programs are often underfunded. “Once I grew up, I started to realize that our language is important,” he says. “I figured, well, if I want to make content where young people from my community can see themselves represented and see that our language has a space in the world—that our language isn’t just confined to our town—I may as well shoot my shot and audition.”

Dream of Darkness immediately felt different from other video games Zeferino had experienced. “Unfortunately, in gaming, you often see women being overly sexualized and wearing bikini armor,” says Zeferino. “But the very first art I saw was a drawing of Marina. She was wearing a huipil and had her hair in an axtlacuilli. And I was like, oh my goodness, this is actual Mesoamerican clothing.”

Zeferino sees himself reflected in Marina. “I don’t have any artistic talent myself. I don’t really have any musical talent. I don’t consider myself much of a writer. But I figured if I have any tool, it’s my voice, and my ability to speak the language. In that way, I relate to Marina, who also had only one tool at her disposal, and that was her voice.”

While Marina was judged for translating for the conquistadors—her name today is sometimes used in Mexico as a synonym for betrayal—Zeferino hopes that players will understand her humanity. “We’re doing a lot to portray a time period from a perspective that often gets ignored. I like that a lot of the characters that we’ve been focusing on are people who get sidelined in the typical narrative of the conquest of Mexico. People think of figures like Hernán Cortés, but there were so many other people who had their own lives, their own stories, their own goals and motivations for why they did what they did.”