Michael Schweikardt's moody, accurately dreary set design keeps the audience from getting too carried away with Adelaide's hopes and dreams.
It's a great moment not because it's bleak and miserable (I'm actually exhausted at how games, like Tomb Raider, confuse dreary world design and characters' suffering with narrative sophistication) but because it lends a slight nuance to the people you're playing as.
Why didn't they follow the lead of the peace-prize judges, who know not to let technicalities about being true to the meaning of the award get in the way of good headlines?In fact, despite its dreary name, mechanism design is a hugely important area of economics, and underpins much of what dismal scientists do today.
A similar transformation is undergone by that dreary, dusty office (designed by Louisa Thompson).
In a glum opening sequence designed to contrast dreary old England with colourful, exotic India, a pushy estate agent refers, somewhat implausibly, to "the grey pound", and it's this economic demographic the film sets out to attract and appeal to.
Imagine if David Blaine told you to pick a card, and that card turned out to be Kings Of Leon, and Kings Of Leon were playing a dreary song that was specifically designed to be someone's fifth choice for a Football Focus highlights soundbed four years from now.
On a dreary, rainy day in Amsterdam, the design studio of Stefan Scholten and Carole Baijings stands out like a fluorescent beacon.
But as they proceed, they must take pains to avoid the rigid rules that governed the first six designs, all of them dreary and all noisily rejected by the public.
The sole exception to this dreary rule is in the field of design.
The playfulness of these designs contrast well with bland, dreary winter landscapes.
