When you want to own an item from a luxury fashion house but can’t afford to spend thousands, fashion magazines tell you to buy something small. A keychain, say. Or a card case. But if you want to own a bit of Louis Vuitton, there’s something you can get for free: Louis the Game.
The mobile game launched on iOS and Android last week to celebrate the 200th anniversary of its namesake founder. While I am very much not a gamer, I cannot resist tech forays into fashion and vice versa, so I tried it out.
The object of the game is to collect 200 candles and, in the process, a passel of postcards about Vuitton’s life, family, and the fashion house he created. You play as the brand’s mascot, Vivienne. Her own ancestry comes from the brand’s monogram print, with her head and one eye formed from the flower pattern.
You can kit out Vivienne in one of 12 looks, including an all-white astronaut-inspired outfit, some casual denim, and what would not look out of place, flower head and all, on an EDM DJ. After going through all the choices (the most fun I had playing the game, honestly), I stayed with her original look: A clash of Vuitton logo and animal prints set off by a pair of red binoculars. The only change I made was swapping out her backpack from a sporty one to a more classic version.
Into the Woods
Then it was off to the countryside, which seemed to be a recreation of idyllic Jura, France, Vuitton’s birthplace. It was easy enough to capture candles here and enjoyable, too, since Vivienne is adorable; she ambled along flapping her clochette arms as she traveled over hills and streams. I am sure it would have seemed more dreamy if I could have gotten the soundtrack to work but no matter how many times I restarted or reset the game, it remained silent.
After Vivienne and I had acquired enough candles and stuffed her backpack with a few postcards, we were able to open a Vuitton trunk that held a golden key. It opened a nearby wooden door and once she walked through it, Vivienne found a waiting hot air balloon, climbed in, and—like Vuitton before her—was off to Paris.
This is where things took a turn. In purple-hued cartoon Paris it was dusk, which in actual Paris is a magical time. So it was at first for Vivienne and me. We collected lots of candles that hovered just above the ground, but when it came to ones that required climbing or jumping, they were hard to get. Over and over I got Vivienne nearly to the top of the Arc de Triomphe, and she would tumble down before capturing the candle atop it. Part of this was on my lack of skill, but even when I handed over the controls to someone with more game experience, they found the controllers laggy and Vivienne hard to maneuver.
No One Games Like Gaston
It took Vivienne and me a long time to make it through Paris and, like exhausted tourists, we grew weary of traversing it over and over. Ostensibly we could have located all the candles with the help of a bellboy named Gaston. Approach him and he unfolds a map that shows all of the levels: the countryside, Paris, Tokyo, Beijing, London, and New York. But it didn’t seem to lead us to any candles.
What we did find was a golden ticket that could be traded in for an NFT version of the first postcard we collected. It didn’t seem worth it, but my decision might have been different had it been one of the Beeples that are randomly doled out. While we didn’t collect all the candles on the level, we had enough to find the golden key and go through a door to Edo-era Tokyo.
This is where I gave up. Running through the beautiful streets lined in red-painted wooden buildings was fun for the first few minutes. But grabbing candles any higher than a few feet off the ground once again proved too difficult. Any time Vivienne grabbed one I maneuvered her to the Vuitton trunk in the middle of the city, but there were not enough to make it open and reveal the golden key inside.
Vivienne abandoned Tokyo and I the game, mostly because my phone became alarmingly hot as I played. So hot that I could smell a burning electronic unpleasantness.
I turned on a gameplay video to see someone else take on the Paris level and as I watched this other, more skilled Vivienne, I wondered about who the game is for. It seems like an idea that could have sprung from the mind of Virgil Abloh, the artistic director of Louis Vuitton’s men’s collection. Abloh has expressed a love of NFTs and a desire to bring the brand into the metaverse. What better way to usher Gen Z into a luxury brand than to follow Vivienne to a soft-focus world that dabbles in cryptocurrency.
