Children's & YA
May 2020
Us
by Michele Cocchi
Tommaso is 16 years old, and hasn’t left the house for 18 months – in fact, he barely leaves his room. He is what psychologists refer to as hikikomori: literally “pulling inward, being confined”. One day, he suddenly abandoned basketball, school, and all his hobbies, and now spends his time watching old NBA matches and playing video games. There is one game in particular which determines the structure of his days, and has become his only means of socialisation. The game is called Us: a multiplayer game where teams of three players carry out 100 challenges per year, one each day. The team that completes the challenge first, while staying united as a group, wins. Tommaso’s avatar, whose head is a skull, is called Logan. His other team members are Rin: a girl who resembles a Japanese manga character, and Hud: a character straight out of a shooter game. These three do not know each other – according to the rules of the game, they are not allowed to discuss their private lives – but they soon become friends. Every day, Us provides them with a “historical” mission. They will fight either for the victims or for the perpetrators – for example, as part of the Colombian FARC, with the German Nazis, or in support of Mandela in South Africa. Every day, they must work out how to reach the end of the mission while surrounded by the horrors of the twentieth century. Every day, they will have someone to save and someone to kill. They will soon discover that history can be brutal, and that it’s not always possible to be the hero.
