No politico-pop culture moment is spared—with new additions added almost daily as the absurdities of Whitehall and the wider world continue to throw up new material. There’s former member of parliament Owen Paterson taking a call in Sainsbury’s, informing him that his party isn’t going to back him in the lobbying scandal after all; Cabinet minister Michael Gove getting his rocks off in a nightclub; a discarded cocktail can on the train suggests MP Diane Abbott has been in the area. The £350 million Brexit bus causes a roadblock; former Tory Rory Stewart’s awkward selfies are ready to print in Snappy Snaps; and Labour party leader Keir Starmer steels himself to nuke Geronimo the alpaca. Make your way through a maze-like abattoir and you’ll discover, though you might not wish to, former prime minister David Cameron getting intimate with a pig. Venture out to the countryside, you’ll find another former prime minister, Theresa May, frolicking in the wheat. There’s even a magic money tree.
Douglas doesn’t go so far as to describe any of this as satire, as he says it doesn’t have a clear intent. Instead, he likes to think of it “more as an interactive shitpost.” In that same vein, the map is littered with references to some of the stranger corners of the internet.
There’s a sack of wet eggs in the supermarket. A man walks his emu down the street. The pub has a piss dungeon. The sewer has a fatberg. In the fried chicken shop, a man calmly eats his chips while a fight breaks out. Gerald Stratford, of Big Veg Twitter fame, tends to his allotment. There are Hellraiser VHS tapes on top of the bus stop. Elsewhere, Douglas pokes fun at collective British obsessions: grab a jetpack and fly through the open window with a St. George’s cross hanging from it and you’ll discover a candlelit shrine to Captain Tom, the 100-year-old man who walked laps of his garden in lockdown to fund the NHS. In the supermarket, a patriotic pizza display (again lifted from real life) declares that “It’s Coming Home.” The more you explore, the more the game resembles a carefully curated depository for the daily churn of meme generation.
All of this has been re-created in painstaking detail by Douglas, who’s taken to photographing objects on the streets surrounding his southeast London home and then Photoshopping them into the game in pursuit of the most compelling experience. Pret A Manger, Greggs, and Sainsbury’s have all had impressive facelifts since first being boxed together in July. And as the joke has snowballed, the project has taken on a greater significance for Douglas.
“I had a psychotic episode and was sectioned in March 2020,” he says. “Finding some comfort in something creative I enjoyed doing as a teenager is helping my recovery a lot.” Between bouts of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) and psychotherapy, Douglas has been pouring his mind and energies into Duke Smoochem. He says his main takeaway from the CBT sessions was “the power of distraction over intrusive thoughts.” Video games—and, even more so, he’s discovered, building them—have served as a balm in low moments, allowing Douglas to put his problems aside for a little while when he’s deep in the editor. His psychiatrist approves too. “[They] said that getting so involved with something like this, completely disconnected from my illness, was a really good step toward recovery,” says Douglas. “It’s good to get that endorsement.”
