Comic Adventure

Objective

Comic Relief needed to pull its core charity audience — schools and kids — into the Red Nose Day 2017 campaign alongside the BBC broadcast, so its digital product team commissioned gaming agencies to build two games, two interactive stories, and the first-ever digital incarnation of the red noses. The second goal was to back up a retail promotion: the 2017 noses sold in blind packs at Sainsbury's and Oxfam, and the rare silver Frankinose unlocked exclusive in-game content, turning a shop purchase into a reason to keep playing.

Solution

The game opens straight in the browser, in the kids' section of the Red Nose Day site — no app, no download. It plays like a voiced comic strip: panels advance as the red noses talk in celebrity voices, with Lenny Henry narrating over the top. The setup is that Red Nose Day itself is in danger, and only the player, by helping the misunderstood Frankenose win the other noses' respect, can save it. The story moves through a run of surreal episodes — Vikings, a DJ set, a village fete, a rockslide — pausing three times to drop the player into a mini-game as absurd as the story around it. Anyone holding the rare silver Frankinose nose gets extra content inside the game that other players never see. A playthrough ends once all three mini-games and the full comic have been worked through.