Along the River During the Qingming Festival
What if a game were made not for profit, but purely to spread culture and art? "Along the River During the Qingming Festival" is such a game. The author approaches it with an academic attitude to study this masterpiece, aiming to let more people appreciate the folk customs of ancient China.
This is a hidden object game with historical and cultural interpretations, attempting to carefully and seriously investigate and verify the intriguing stories expressed in "Along the River During the Qingming Festival".
The main gameplay currently involves finding 352 objects or characters in the painting. Each item comes with annotations explaining its function and situation in the painting.
Many objects and customs shown in the ancient painting no longer exist today and can only be guessed and inferred from existing books and experience. Naturally, there are some unsolved mysteries worth discussing and debating. Therefore, the game includes some unverified conjectures that may not align with mainstream views and are the author's personal interpretations, provided for reference only.
"Along the River During the Qingming Festival" mainly showcases the ships, bridges, houses, marketplaces, festive activities, and cultural customs of the Northern Song Dynasty. The details are so vivid it's as if the social landscape of that time was captured by a camera.
On that wooden bridge with no pillars, whose manufacturing technique has long been lost, a crowd surges, with nearly a hundred merchants, officials, sailors, fishermen, and passersby filling the space.
The streets are full of shops, signboards, and vendors, including fortune tellers, storytellers, bicycle repairmen, medicine sellers, doctors, barbers, touts, porters, sedan chair bearers, and gamblers - people from all walks of life.
In terms of ships, it meticulously depicts the ship structure, detachable raise-and-lower stern rudder technology, anchor chain assembly, decoration styles of passenger and cargo ships, types of goods transported, and details of people's lives on boats such as cooking, worshiping, doing laundry, rowing, punting, sightseeing, and resting.