2003’s Manhunt is a brutal, gritty title that occupies a strange place in Rockstar’s catalog as something that should be considered the company’s best work, yet it remains overshadowed by their own mega-hit franchises. This bleak, uncompromising meditation on the nature of voyeurism questioned the player’s participation in horrific bloodshed, and has since become something of a cult title — and PIGFACE is certainly one of its descendants.

Set in a post-industrial wasteland, PIGFACE places players in the role of a woman with a bomb in her head. Faceless handlers have assigned her to murder members of a drug-dealing gang across a handful of locations, and what little characterization the game offers has those same handlers shocked by how little pushback they receive from their living weapon – almost as if she’s as much down for all the murder as the people playing the game. The gameplay is as basic as the graphics – this looks like a Quake-era experience and feels like gritty, vicious shooters of that time, back when most titles were developed by a handful of people and when it was easier to smuggle bizarre and extreme content into even major titles.

After choosing a mission, the player picks their loadout from a decent arsenal – but in a twist that feels strange for an FPS (and may have been inherited from Manhunt) the player can only bring a single ranged weapon. This creates a bit of awkwardness, as the player is asked to decide on a playstyle before they have a sense of what the level is like, and pre-mission the briefings are not particularly voluminous. So, there’s often nothing to do but guess whether a sniper rifle or a shotgun is better for any given area, and if that doesn’t pan out, they can hope to snag a more appropriate weapon off of a dead body somewhere along the way.

The strange part is that for a game seemingly built around experimentation and taking chances, the developers punish players harshly for mistakes. Any time they fail a mission, a steep financial penalty is incurred. While guns only have to be bought once and ammo is free, healing syringes cost money, ensuring that if a player fails a particularly difficult level more than a couple of times, they’ll be forced to try again with even fewer resources, and consequently, less chance of success.

Enemy AI is also a little on the spare side at this point. I’m sure it’s a difficult to balance and all of the enemies can be best described as drug-addled wastrels, but they were remarkably unobservant and unresponsive whenever violence kicked off — enemies will watch a guard’s head get blown off with a sniper rifle, shrug, and then get right back to their patrol seconds later. Setting off explosives or blasting away with a machine gun might attract reinforcements, or it might not – enemies were largely unpredictable in an ‘is the AI broken and not responding to triggers?‘ kind of way.

Still, there’s plenty to be optimistic about here. The violence is every bit as brutal and upsetting as one would hope given PIGFACE’s obvious inspiration. There are huge blood spatters with every shot, and enemies scramble around and scream as they’re injured, making the whole thing feel doubly unpleasant.

This unpleasantness also permeates every bit of the world. Every room is full of trash and dirty needles. The player is asked to shut down drug factories, and all they find are a few drums and jars crudely linked together with hoses and tape. This game is about the absolute lowest-tier of criminal being executed by an assassin who lives in a dingy one-room apartment next to a set of elevated train tracks. It’s a celebration of the grindhouse aesthetic and seemingly pointless violence – although as the story gets developed in later updates, that might well change.

PIGFACE is in a rough Early Access state at the moment, with inconsistent enemies and no real narrative to speak of. I don’t expect the graphics to get any better – the low-end look is the point — and it’s a clear throwback to a rougher, more brutal past. Anyone lamenting that we never got a Manhunt 3 will find a lot to love here.

Assuming gameplay is rebalanced and more levels are added – I beat all five in just under an hour – this is extremely promising. Hopefully the devs manage to turn it into a more complete experience, as games this heartlessly brutal are few and far between.

Or maybe this kind of game being rare is a good thing? I’ll let history be the judge.

The post PIGFACE Preview appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

Being able to attend Gamescom 2025 in Cologne on a leisurely, hustle-free basis is one of the perks of living in Belgium, aside from enjoying the best French fries (which are originally Belgian) along with quality mayonnaise and chocolate pralines all year long!

While Gamescom 2025 was my second time visiting this popular annual gaming event (RIP E3) it came with both joy and fear — joy from playing some of the boldest upcoming titles, and fear from realizing a rising and costly trend in the industry.

Let’s start with the good and go through the three boldest Gamescom 2025 demos that I played.

***

Pragmata

It’s always nice to see big names trying new ideas, especially when it’s Capcom. Though the idea behind Pragmata looks like another take on the humans vs rogue AI trope, the way Capcom added a cute little girl as the companion AI to support the player enriched the experience emotionally. Gameplay, on the other hand, is bold. Players have to hack enemies (in a tech sense) and shoot them at the same time while avoiding being hit. Though both the hacking and gunplay mechanics are pretty straightforward, doing them together is the exciting challenge that’s unique to Pragmata. There are also platforming aspects as the protagonists hover around the environment and over pits and traps with a jetpack, but the demo was too short to focus much on this aspect. For those who are tired of every action game being another soulslike, roguelike, Overwatch clone or remake, Pragmata is a breath of fresh air.

***

Onimusha: The Way of the Sword

I love fantasy action games — perhaps it’s due to growing up in the early 2000s, when there were loads of them. The PlayStation 2 was full of great entries in the genre, Onimusha was one of them. The series started as a hack & slash based on Capcom’s technical achievements made with the Resident Evil series, but soon found its own footing. After a long hiatus that lasting two decades, a new Onimusha is coming next year, and boy, it’s good to have it back! What immediately caught my eye with Way of the Sword’s demo was how the game retained its unique essence. While the basic swordplay was what one might expect, Way of the Sword creates a cycle that players needed to actively follow during combat. Enemies take damage and have their postures broken before they can be executed, but if players keep button-mashing, they’ll lose the execution window. The swordplay also feels weighty and authentically recreated with the goal of making every stroke of the blade feel painful and real. To anyone who is an old-time fan of the series or any Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice fans that are tired of waiting for the sequel, Onimusha the Way of the Sword is a sight for sore eyes.

***

Crimson Desert

Pearl Abyss’s Crimson Desert is a promising Korean title, and perhaps the most ambitious one on my list. Set in the world of the popular Black Desert Online, Pearl Abyss’ upcoming third-person action-adventure is one of the most mechanically complicated titles in the genre that I’ve seen, seemingly a blend of other wildly successful action-adventure franchises. There are levitated sky islands that can be reached and explored like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. The climbing and parkour mechanics are inspired by the Middle-Earth: Shadow series, and the combat is something like the new era of Assassin’s Creed titles. There are just so many mechanics! The list includes (but is not limited to) gliding, riding a horse, climbing, picking up and dropping objects, light and heavy sword attacks, blocking and parrying, using magic and ultimate abilities, dodging and vaulting over enemies, and using environmental attacks and weapons, and more. In the demo, it was truly difficult to learn them all. In my experience, titles with such a huge swath of mechanics end up being shallow and incoherent. Yet there have been studios that defy the odds and make history. Hopefully, Pearl Abyss’ ambitious Crimson Desert is one of them.

***

Profit & Problems

So that was the good. Now, to the not-so-good.

What caught my attention in this regard at 2025 Gamescom were the number of reappearances. A lot of titles, even smaller indies like Reanimal and Little Nightmares 3, returned to Gamescom this year. While at first that didn’t seem like anything special, when digging a bit deeper I felt like this is signaling an issue plaguing the industry — long development times.

The longer it takes for a product to be made, the more time and energy the workforce behind it is supposed to invest. Consequently, the costs of production increase as companies have to pay the workforce for their time. Long development times used to be an issue mainly experienced by AAA game devs, but 2025 Gamescom was, a turning point, in my opinion, as many studios seem to be wrestling with this challenge.

Of course, we love videogames as a medium that enables us to interact with artists’ visions, but the fact is that videogames are also part of the entertainment industry — and actually, its most lucrative branch. For any industry to survive, it needs to be sustainable. As such, extended development times create an unsustainable environment in which many games might eventually cost so much and take so long that by the time the game is published there’s little chance of recouping costs and making profit in such a competition-heavy, fast-moving medium. Without change, I fear the current situation can only lead to a crash akin to the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s.

We’ve already seen how big industry names are jumping on the “$80 pricepoint” train while others are downsizing or replacing workforce with AI, which comes with its own wealth of issues. Of course, there are ways to decrease the development costs and time, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be painless, and we might have to start thinking about new norms and new expectations.

There’s no easy way out of this situation, and the elephant in the Gamescom hall is becoming more and more difficult to avoid. If nothing changes, players will pay increased prices while waiting half a decade for our favorite games to hit shelves. I don’t think that’s attractive to anyone, and it certainly doesn’t seem sustainable.

At the end of the day, both producers and consumers will likely need to buckle up and work together to find a new way to improve things for all sides.

The post OPINION: The Good & Bad – Gamescom 2025 appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

Daniel Weissenberger sits down to chat with John and Rob Doncan — the two-man group behind development studio Bad Viking. They released Strange Horticulture in 2022 to rave reviews, and now they’re on the verge of releasing their new title, Strange Antiquities. We chat about design, how puzzles fit into a world with items, and which cat is best. Be sure to keep an eye out for Strange Antiquities which releases September 17th for Steam and Switch!

TRANSCRIPT:

GameCritics.com: Today on GameCritics, we’re talking to Bad Vikings John and Rob Doncan. The developers responsible for the instant classic puzzle game Strange Horticulture. Their new game, Strange Antiquities, is a sequel of sorts set in the same world, but moving the action to a shop for rare and mysterious artifacts. All right, we’re joined today by John and Rob, the two man developer team responsible for the Strange franchise. Is that what you guys refer to it as?

Rob: Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s what we’d call it. Yeah. 

GC: In 2022, they gave us Strange Horticulture, a game about sorting and finding rare and mysterious plants. And now upcoming is the sequel, Strange Antiquities. So, can I start right at the beginning? What were your big influences in kicking off the Strange franchise? Like I can go to your website and look at your library and there’s a lot of action games in there and if I looked at the end of the four games you made beforehand. Strange Horticulture is quite a departure. 

Rob: Yeah, it it is. But there’s like… there is history there as well. Like you know kind of point and click games we played growing up and we made a couple of those as well. So kind of puzzly stuff was always in our blood, I think. You know, we… we grew up with games like Mist and Riven and, in particular the Discworld series as well. We loved those games, which obviously kind of more humor, than we necessarily have ended up doing here. But yeah, so I think there is, you know, there’s some history there. And then another thing that we were really inspired by was board games. So I mean you might be able to see behind me.

GC: Katan and Gloomhaven. 

Rob: Yeah, got a little board game collection going on here. So I think specifically stuff like Eldritch Horror and there’s a game called Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective which you have, if you haven’t played, there’s a similar sort of map mechanic in it where you go around London solving crimes. And so we kind of borrowed that slightly for Strange Horticulture. Obviously, there’s a map in it and you can… you solve puzzles to find your way around to find plants and and uncover the story, that sort of stuff. So yeah, board games, old adventure games and point and click games and puzzle games kind of always been there for us. 

GC: Okay. 

John: Yeah. I think I think… I think with… basically when we came to making Strange Horticulture, we were sort of… we’ve been toying around with loads of ideas for like a year. We kind of had a bit of a failure when we tried to make a sort of artillery game for Steam that didn’t do so well. And we were… we were toying with a board game idea. We were toying with a point and click adventure game set in a town called Undermere. And then it was Rob who came he he went out one day on a dog walk and came back saying I’ve seen an advert for some gardening company or I don’t know what it was exactly but he he he I think it had the word “horticulture” in it and he came back and he pitched he said I’ve had an idea called Strange Horticulture and it’s like about running an occult plant shop and what do you think and I I just said you know what that sounds really cool can we let’s make that game ’cause you know we we we hadn’t latched on to anything in a kind any kind of strong way. We… and we were desperate for a kind of… like… you know something some kind of source of inspiration and that just seemed really cool like I I could instantly kind of see something in that. So we dropped everything else and then it’s funny how like you start borrowing things. If you take the setting from the point and click game that we were sort of half working on, the map from Rob says Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, but we’d actually put that into our own little board game thing. And we took… we took that from there and and suddenly we built up this kind of world and obviously we’re just a two man team so we’re like let’s try and keep you know play to our strengths. We really liked the concept of the what they’ done with… what Lucas Pope had done with Papers, Please and having it all on one screen and kind of the tactile feel of the you know stamping documents and opening books and things like that. And we were like that could work really nicely here and having it in a single sort of screen layout. So let’s borrow that kind of game design. But like you’re… you’re studying books and studying law and and trying to find out about plants and yeah, it’s amazing how these kinds of things (work) together. But yeah, if you look at our sort of game history, it’s not the most obvious like of moves, but sometimes you got to move in tangents in this industry and hey, look, now we’re making strange games and having fun with it. 

GC: Oh man. Okay. Now here’s just a game… just a question about playing the game. Am I not playing it right if the minute I started I turned on auto-label? 

Rob: No, I mean look, that’s obviously we kind of know that there’s a subset of people that are going to love labeling their plants and it’s really interesting. We’ve watched a lot of playthroughs, particularly of people playing the demo of Strange Antiquities. Um, and there’s a lot of people who see the popup saying, you can turn on autolabeling if if labeling items isn’t your thing. And a lot of people who say, “No, it really is my thing. I don’t want to turn on autolabeling.” And then equally, there’s a lot of people who say, “Yeah, it’s not my thing. It’s not for me.” And they turn it on. So, yeah, I don’t know what the split is necessarily. Like it kind… I think this kind of game does appeal to people who like sort of organizing stuff, but it’s not that’s not what it’s about. That’s kind of a a side quest if you like, but yeah, you’re not cheating if you turn on auto labeling. That’s why we put it there. 

John: Yeah. But it was always our intention to offer that side of it. It’s like, you know, for people that want to arrange their shelves how they want to arrange them and they want to give each… each plant or each item its own label, you know, there’s something kind of quite fun about that in a weird kind of… like organizational way. Like I think some people get a lot out of that. So, it’s definitely Yeah, it’s just two types of player and some people want to turn them auto labeling on and others would rather label their own plants. And which… either camp you’re in, we just offer different… that play style to both. And it’s up to you. And that’s the great thing about being able to choose.

Rob: The… I will say that the steam thread of how to arrange your plants on Strange Horticulture is the longest thread in the whole back end… in the whole discussion section. So yeah, people get quite into it. The favorite… my favorite one that someone posted was that they arranged them by smell so the nice… the nice smelling ones are near the customers as they come in. 

GC: That’s fantastic. Sorry, that’s very good. It did not occur to me with No, I… I will say that I would have had a much easier time in the endgame if I had sorted them all by what kind of thematic resonance they gave off early in the game. 

Rob: Right. Yeah. 

GC: Like if there’s one tip to make the game a lot easier, it’s the minute you get that lens, put on the labels what kind of… what kind of resonance they have ’cause that is going to save you a ton of time. 

Rob: Yeah. Yeah. yeah. I think again some people are kind of naturally more organizational and they’ll just do that instinctively. Again, you see it watching people just playing the demo that, you know, different labeling systems. Some people are really organized and other people are just chaotic. I think John and I, well certainly me, I would be in the more chaotic camp. 

John: Yeah. I mean I was I… I think… I don’t think I’ve ever even put on auto labels or done any labeling, but that’s because I know I know the item sort of off by heart. So I just like where’s my thingy? Yeah, I’ll go find that. So yeah, like I think if I was playing it myself from scratch, I’d be an auto labeler to be honest. 

GC: Okay, good. I’m not alone. Is that a real cat’s purr on the soundtrack? 

Rob: I assume so. It’s a licensed sound effect. So…

JOhn: It certainly will be a real cat’s pur.

Rob: I’d be surprised if it’s not… not my, not our cats, though. 

GC: (I’m) really wondering if you recorded it live. 

Rob: That would have been cool. Yeah. 

GC: Is it the same purr in both games? 

Rob: No. A new purr for a new cat. 

GC: Okay. Alright. It sounded different to me. I just had no idea if that was just my ears playing tricks. Alright, at what point did you start coming up with the idea of doing Strange Antiquities? Were you… Did it happen during the development of Strange Horticulture or after it was finished? 

John: Oh, after like we… Strange Horticulture was like… We were so focused on Strange Horticulture all the way through like we didn’t even think about what to do after ’cause we had no idea like how it was going to be received or anything like that. So the focus was entirely let’s get make for us it was about making the best game that we could with our resources. I mean one of the kind of ideas we had during development was let’s make try and make somebody’s favorite game. That was like a concept we were… we were working with rather than trying to make something that’s like going to make loads of money or is going to be critically acclaimed or let’s make one person’s favorite game and see where it goes. So we… we tried that. We made the best game we possibly could and then we released it and gosh the reception was so much bigger than anything we could have imagined like in terms of the feedback, the reviews the audience were they just seem to really enjoy it. And so after that we were like well makes sort of sense to do another strange game I think. Um, and we still felt we had more stories to tell in Undermere. 

Rob: …but we kind of felt like we… we’d maybe exhausted like, not exhausted, but we put all our best plant ideas into Strange Horticulture and we wanted to try something a bit different. So, I don’t think we thought too much. Correct me if I’m wrong, John, but I don’t think we took too long to decide it was going to be Antiquities. I think that strange like occult artifacts kind of made sense to us pretty quickly.

John: Yeah, we were brainstorming ideas for a follow-up. And honestly, it was quite a short list. I think it was like sort of occult items, cryptic creatures, there might have been something else, but basically the natural progression for us felt like yeah, antiquities. Yeah, you know, you go into museums and there’s cursed items and items about witchcraft and all sorts of that. So, it… it works in the world really well. 

GC: Okay. Next question. Now, you’ve already mentioned and gave a wonderful shout out to Papers, Please, Lucas Pope’s just amazing simulator. Were there any other games that really you felt influenced you in designing this one? 

Rob: I mean that Papers Please was definitely the biggest one I think. I mean although it’s interesting we probably get compared more to Lucas Pope’s other big game, the Return to Obra Dinn. 

GC: Return. Yeah. 

Rob: Because the gameplay is perhaps more similar to that… that sort of deductive reasoning.

GC: …looking at all of the oblique clues to put together the answer. 

Rob: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. but that wasn’t really intentional. we kind of yeah that just sort of happened. but yeah I I can’t think of any other specific games that we were in by..

John: I think thematically we you know we had come across things like Cultist Simulator and Fallen London games and things like that and we sort of we we didn’t… Rob’s played Cultist Simulator, I haven’t played these games, but it… it was kind of like looking into those kind of like cultish occult things, we just felt like there was something cool there. And when we started and that was like always the idea, right? It was going to be occult plants. And then we started researching it and kind of looking into it more and you kind of come across things like well in the 15th century that there was a famous botanist in the in in Britain called Nicholas Culpepper and he wrote something called complete herbal which was like a guide to like pharmaceutical plant use and and other uses you know mystical uses more spiritual uses I guess and you sort of get we got a copy of it and you kind of go oh it’s got the plant. The sketch of the plant and like a description of the plant and then what does it do? And you know it can be how from like settling stomach to warding off spirits. And we were like that’s… that’s really cool. Like why don’t we just take that kind of concept and just you know go our go even more sort of supernaturally occulty like fun with it. and that’s kind of what we did. So yeah, those are the kinds of things we were inspired by. less probably like specific games just…

Rob: There was also well as I mentioned earlier the board games but there was also a game called Coffee Talk which itself was kind of inspired by Papers, Please and a game called Va-11 Hall-A, I assume as well which… Coffee Talk is about you know being a barista in a kind of fantasy setting not sure what you’d call it exactly but that that kind of taught us that you can have this kind of slower paced game play. and like it can be kind of chilled and you know it doesn’t… doesn’t need to be fast-paced or frantic or anything like that. You can do quite a lot with a little. 

GC: Okay. Yeah. All right. On the website for the game, Rob is listed as coding and designing. John is doing the art and designing. Who is writing the character dialogue and book entries because there’s so many of them in the game. 

Rob: Yeah, true. Well, that’s Yeah, that’s pretty much all me. Oviously with some help from John as well. And actually John’s wife wrote some of the like flavor text for some of the locations that you can visit in the first game, I believe. 

John: I think… Well, yeah, we sat down together, Steph and I, and just like just took locations and just started writing descriptions and stuff. So, yeah, I think most when I say game design is, you know, it’s a collaborative process and that includes things like the story, we we we come up with some ideas, we we talk about it like and then but most of the writing is definitely Rob’s side of it, but that doesn’t mean to say I don’t get involved. I’ve… I’ve done a few little bits in the game like I think most of the epilogue entries I think are more me in… in the game. So it is a collaborative process. it’s just our main roles are art and code and then we also have loads of other hats that we put on, you know, like sound design, animator, narrative designer, marketing, social media, community stuff. We do… we do so much just as just the two of us. 

GC: Okay. All right. So specifically about the text, what challenges did you face in coming up with the kind of word puzzles that are in the entries? I have to imagine it’s kind of difficult writing these entries that tow the line between legitimately sounding like a description of the item and the history of the item without just giving away what it is… 

Rob: Right? Yeah. Yeah. Very challenging. And much more challenging designing those puzzles on strange antiquities than it was on Strange Horticulture. Partly because obviously plants all share similar properties, right? So you can describe a plant’s leaves as being heart-shaped or whatever and that could apply to any plant and you have to go and check all of your plants on your shelf and see if they have heart-shaped leaves. Whereas you can’t really do that with items. Like if you say it has a handle or whatever then okay yeah that could apply to a couple of items but not many. If you say well yeah so it’s about like trying to use those broader terms. So trying to… trying to find those broader descriptive terms. So like using the material maybe or you know we might say it’s a pendant or it’s a totem or something. You’ve got lots of those on your shelves. So that’s kind of what we try and do is… is give a broader descriptive clue or maybe try and use a sketch or something like that that could apply to more than one item. And then we’ll try and have other clues peppered in there that will help you narrow it down. where you might have to use some other tools to help you do that. So, you might have to inspect the item in some way, see if it makes a sound or has a threatening aura or something like that. Or you might have to weigh it or use some other items in your shop to kind of help you get there. But yeah, that was… that was certainly a challenge this time round. But I think by working through that challenge, we perhaps came up with some more interesting ideas this time around, and hopefully some more interesting puzzles came out of that process.

John: Yeah, I mean it took longer like… the process way longer than in Strange Horticulture to come up with one all these items visually like plants because they’re similar. You… I just started drawing plants and then you just draw the next one and you kind of find some way of comparing them and making (them) interesting. It’s almost like we designed the puzzles first and then designed the items and then… then you also have to come back and try and throw in little bits of red herrings for other puzzles. And like it’s, you know, it’s about creating a putting in a few clues into the description like as Rob said, one that’s a broader sort of clue, one that’s more of a like narrow it down and a clincher. And but also making it sort of vague enough and interesting enough and appealing enough law-wise that it sort of like it has this richness to it in the game as well. So it’s… it’s an incredibly difficult process. I think it… it’s when we come up with a way that’s to do a puzzle that is unique and completely different to how you’re used to kind of using your book looking for and those are the ones which are, I think, land the best on the player as well. So the more of those we can put in the better really. 

Rob: And some of my favorite ones are the ones where it’s like one small sentence. So you… you know you get ones that are like have three or four quite maybe disguised clues but like…

GC: The insanity card where it’s just like I don’t know what the entry is something (like) “This is as mysterious as insanity in the mind itself.” Thanks. Hugely helpful. 

Rob: Doesn’t give you much to go on, but then you know once you crack it, I think…

GC: Very satisfying. Exactly. 

Rob: Right. Yeah. Great. 

GC: How much and well when you’re writing tests… texts this complex to work as puzzles, how much testing of that do you have to do, right? Do you have people you’d normally test this stuff on? 

Rob: Yeah, I mean obviously as as much as possible is the answer, but that is hard because well one of the biggest problems that we face with a game like this is that it doesn’t really fall into place until quite close to the end of the game like end of development in the sense that as John says you know in designing the items one item on its own is not a puzzle. You need 10 items on your shelf that you haven’t identified yet so that there can be ones to compare it against. So until you’ve kind of designed those other items that might be red herrings, you know, you can’t and… you’ve designed the… the tools to identify these items, you can’t show it to someone and say, “Is this working or isn’t it?” So yeah, that obviously came quite late in development. 

GC: You have to make the game before you know if it’s any good. 

John: Yeah, basically. Yeah. Yeah, it’s not a game that we could like… Even with Strange Horticulture, it’s not a game that we were able to prototype and sort of and test out on people and say, “Does this work?” We… we just had to go with sort of like a gut instinct and and as you say, just basically make the game and then try it out on people and hope that it works…

Rob: But obviously once then once you do try it out on people, you find out, okay, this one is too hard, this one’s too easy or whatever. And then you can kind of go back in and tweak them all and add in more red herrings where required or clarify certain bits here and there. So we’ve done a lot of that obviously and that’s where yeah play testers come into it. 

John: Yeah, especially like you know we… when we launched the demo one of the things obviously it’s only the first two days but all those are the… the easier side of the puzzle. So it’s, you know, we can see how people are interacting with it, where the points of friction are, try and smooth it through, and then you kind of go, okay, that’s how they’re playing. Is there anything else we need to do further up in the game? Like that will just ease people’s frictions. And we’re never going to get it perfect. Like we… we try our hardest to balance the game as as well as we can. Like not too easy, not too hard. You know, I always sort of try and lean towards making it hard and then we realize we’ve we it’s too hard. We got to go… have to go back the other way. But then we were… we were discussing some feedback and a puzzle yesterday and Rob found a quote by Ron Gilbert who did um… 

GC: Monkey Island.

John: Yeah. And he was like, you know, stick stick to hard basically. I can’t remember exactly what it was. 

Rob: He said yeah he is on the side of making it too hard. What he doesn’t want to do is like, you know, if… if you’ve given the players the tools to work something out and there’s a wrench on the table was his specific quote. Don’t be tempted to make the wrench bounce up and down and flash in their face ‘cause part of the fun of these kind of games is figuring that stuff out for yourself. And you know not… you don’t have to make every puzzle easier. It’s just the ones where you know if… if every single play tester trips up on it, that’s obviously you know that’s a flag. But you know some… some things some people are going to find a bit harder and some people will breeze through it and that’s okay. 

John: But it’s about creating those aha moments where you know where you… you know if it’s too easy you don’t get that reward. If it and it’s if it’s too hard, you also and it doesn’t really make sense, you don’t get that reward. But if it’s hard enough that you can work it out and then you do work it out, the sense of satisfaction you get from that is much greater. 

GC: Oh, I agree completely. There’s a lot of really satisfying moments in the game. There’s some… there’s some tough ones, but when you figure it out, it just feels fantastic. 

Rob: Awesome. 

GC: I was thinking about one particularly difficult one, but I’m not going to spoil it here. I tell you later. All right. Do you guys each have a favorite character in the game? 

Rob: For me, I think it’s got to be Verona Green. Partly because she is a returning character from Strange Horticulture. So, if you played that game, you might recognize her. And I mean, she’s kind of… she’s pretty central in both games. She’s… she’s kind of half based on a kind of Granny Weatherwax sort of character from Discworld, if you’re familiar with her. She’s just… Yeah, she’s kind of the… the beating heart of Undermere. I think she kind of keeps everything ticking over. 

John: I mean, like, it would be remiss if I said my favorite character wasn’t the cat because my favorite character is the cat, you know? He’s the central kind of character throughout the game. Well, both games, obviously. It’s a different cat now. But he’s the constant throughout like, he’s always there. He’s minding his own business. You know, he runs the place basically. You, you’re just like… so yeah definitely I would say the cat Jupiter.

GC: Okay. Yeah, one thing I did love about Jupiter is when he’s napping if you hit the… if you hit the bell, of course he’s alarmed that you woke him up but if you pet him first he’ll be awake and he won’t mind the bell.

John: Yeah that’s like something from Strange Horticulture which was a happy accident just how it was set up like and then people loved it or found it, found out about it and loved it so much and then when we released the demo it didn’t have that and people were like excuse me can you fix that please!

Rob: We added that back in. 

GC: Fantastic! Do you have a favorite one of the items in the game?

Rob: I think I’m going to go with an item called the Bloodbeck which I have to be careful here to not give away any sort of puzzle. But it is this kind of mysterious item that has whispered voices and you don’t know if they’re the voices of the dead or the voices of the mysterious nameless gods.

John: I mean honestly, I don’t know the items like inherently by name or by what they do but I do like as the artist is… is for me it’s how they resonate visually. So, I can say like my favorites there are like there’s a wooden doll item with some markings on his head, which I’ve… I don’t know why. I’ve just always liked it. Like I think it’s cool. It could… I can see it in a museum or something. And there’s also one which has… is it’s like a… a sort of doll, a wooden doll with earrings and a big…

GC:  …Disc headdress on top. 

John: Yeah. Yeah. I just… I just like it those… those ones visually like I don’t know. Like and so when… when I did some stickers for Strange Horticulture for Gamescom recently those… those are ones that got printed up. So yeah like um…

GC: Okay. Yeah, there they are. And of course the skull and the flower that use… 

John: Well, that’s kind of in the game’s loading screen. 

Rob: Yeah, it’s quite an iconic one. 

John: Yeah, it became like early on it it was one of the sort of earlier designs and it became like kind of the the insignia for the game like the emblem and…and so it’s… it’s kind of on the the Steam small banner and we kind we kind of use it as our kind of icon I guess. 

GC: Yeah. No, it… it’s quite an image because it ties things of course back to Strange Horticulture. You got the plant right there. 

John: That’s it. There’s a little bit of that and I think like the kind of skull and like the way it is it kind of feels occult and so which it’s a cool… it’s just a cool design. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. 

GC: All right. Now, here’s a question. How did you decide on the yacht dice minigame as a way of punishing players for just random clicking? 

Rob: That was… I’m not sure exactly where that idea came from. Well, so we had something similar in Strange Horticulture where yeah, if you fill up your rising dread meter, we call it and you get a game over. You have a little puzzle to solve to get back in. And we got some really good feedback on that. Some players really loved it. And then I think the players that hit it quite a lot found it quite frustrating that they were just doing the same puzzle over and over again, which yeah, fair enough. We… we take that on board. So we wanted to do something that could be more replayable. Which is a real challenge when you want it to be something quite simple like not take too long and get you back into the game you know within a minute or two, max 5 minutes, something like that. So yeah it went through quite a few iterations but I think we went with a dice game partly because again inspired by board games and those kind of mechanics. Partly because I think visually it’s… it looks cool having, you know, the 3D dice in there, I think it works really well. And partly because it introduces a luck factor. So, there’s that kind of randomizing element. But then balancing that and making sure because the first iteration we did of it, we, you know, we sent it off to our publishers and like, oh, what do you think of this? And they absolutely hated it because it was just way too hard. And they were just getting so frustrated that they couldn’t just get back into the game. So, we tweaked it quite a lot and made it easier. And we also added in a fun little feature where… so if you roll X’s, that’s kind of like a bad thing. You don’t want to roll those. But if you roll two or more of them, Jupiter can swipe his paw across and reroll them for you, which is, kind of nice. 

GC: It’s a delightful surprise. Is the first time it happened. Yeah. Just reached in to help me out. 

Rob: Yeah. 

John: It’s for us like that… the mini game like the game, we call it the game over minigame internally. And it’s basically… it’s needed in the game to stop people just trying every item on the shelf systematically and brute forcing every puzzle. We want people to actually try and work out the right item. So, we have to have something that takes people out so there’s an incentive to try and get the right item first time round. And obviously, if you’re playing the game correctly, you should never see the game over mini game. You should be able to go through the whole game without seeing it. But it’s there like as… and it’s got to fit sort of thematically like does it does it work like does it work within this world? It’s got to be kind of simple to play. And then we also wanted to try and make it so that if you are coming back to it regularly like you can kind of learn how to play it and then we try and increase the difficulty a little bit as you go along. So it becomes almost like a game in itself which you can kind of have… have and there is some sort of strategy to it. So yeah, I think whether people like it or not, we… we don’t, it’s going to be hard to judge until it comes out, but it’s… it’s the best we were able to come up with for that yeah, that section of the game. 

GC: Yeah. As you say, to keep people from just brute forcing every puzzle because it takes you out of the experience if you’re just click click click. Okay, well that doesn’t work, that doesn’t work. Okay. No, it… it absolutely had a great effect there as does the hint system. Did you discuss whether you wanted to have a hint system in the game or was that always the plan? 

John: The… the hint system is there again for, like, people who get to a point where they’re really stuck and they’re going to quit the game and never come back to it. And it’s like, you know, why are we trying to punish people if they’re having a hard time? like let’s give them clues and rather than just telling them the answer, let’s try and like give a, you know, a simple clue and then if they’re still struggling another clue and then if they’re still struggling it maybe a final clue that really hints at it. But like it’s about providing as seamless an experience for everyone. And so having the hints, is something we always plan to do in Strange Horticulture and then for this absolutely we would… we definitely added it. And we’ve done another thing this time round which we didn’t do previously which is we kind of we talked a lot about it and then we’ve just decided to do it anyway is when you solve a puzzle and you identify an item in the in the screen that comes up there’s a popup and we we list the reason…

GC: What the clues were. 

John: What the clues were. The idea being that if someone wasn’t entirely sure why that was the right answer, we’ve given them the clues so that they can go, “Ah, okay, that makes sense.” And also maybe get into the way we think and how we’re setting puzzles, 

GC: Teaching them what to look for in future puzzles. 

Rob: Right, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, that was the thinking behind it. Sure. 

GC: Well, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, and that’s what it… that’s the effect it had on me. So, I confirm that works. You say the game is largely not humorous, and I think that’s true, but there are a lot of moments of levity in there, like at the time I clicked, you know, to feel what the texture of a bottle’s label was, and the answer was papery. 

Rob: Right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Sure. 

GC: Is there stuff that from there that, like, really makes you guys laugh? 

Rob: Yeah. So when I said (it) is less humorous, I guess I was meaning in contrast to something like Discworld, which is very silly like super British sarcastic kind of humor. We do… we do have some of that kind of dry humor in there as well. You can probably tell from our accents that we’re British and… and that’s yeah, that’s kind of in our DNA there. So yeah, we did put a few things in. I’m struggling to think of any good examples off the top of my head, but yeah, I think certainly Verona adds that partly that’s why I like Verona Green because she adds a bit of that sort of wit to her um… 

GC: ..in her interactions. 

John: Yeah. when we… when we can be witty, we we’ll try and add some wit in just ‘cause it… it works well with the kind of it’s… it’s about a counterpoint to the dark kind of more sinister stuff going on when you can provide moments of levity and I think they’re important. So…

GC: Okay. All right. Now, you’re you’ve already told me that when you’re designing the quests, ‘cause it’s funny, I wrote out my question and it’s like, what comes first? The character who has a problem solved or the item you want to use, but it seems to me the real organ order you’re doing this is you come up with a puzzle you want to do first and then the other two fold into that. That a fair way of describing it? 

Rob: Yes, pretty much, I’d say. Yeah, I think that’s kind of how we approached it was design as many or… or come up with as many puzzles as we could. Like, yeah, I’ve got kind of pages of notebooks filled of just different ideas for item puzzles and… and then you kind of design an item around that. And then because you can you can kind of like not always, but you can kind of tweak the use case of an item to fit where you need it. But yeah, I mean, honestly, this was a real headache for us because yeah, we… we’ve got a narrative going on there as well. So, anyone who comes into your shop, ‘cause it’s not a narrative where you’re kind of necessarily driving it yourself by going out into the world and speaking to different characters, that sort of stuff. It’s more that you… you’re kind of yeah, you’re in your shop and characters come to you and they might propel the narrative forward with a little snippet of dialogue here and there. But then those characters that come in, they… they have to come in for a reason generally. You know, sometimes the character will come in, you know, where we just could not think of an item that this person would need at that point and they just go away and there was no real purpose to their visit other than they wanted to come in and talk to you. But that’s… there’s not too many of those. So yeah, trying to come up with a reason for every single visit and fitting in those use cases for each item. Yeah, real real headache for us and took us quite a long time to kind of unravel that.

GC: Now, for… from a replayability standpoint, at the end of the game, I won’t spoil what happens, but you let us know what happened to all of the characters. How many different character end states did you end up putting in the game? 

Rob: That’s a good question. I… I don’t actually know off the top of my head. Yeah. So, there are… I was going to say there are 10 character characters who kind of have a more central role in the story and that you… give you have bios of them. I think it’s 10. And then there are a couple more who don’t have bios, but they do show up in that endgame summary because they, you know, got intertwined in the story somehow and… and you might want to find out how they turned out. So yeah each of those has you know at least two or three different end states but some of them have quite a few. 

John: Yeah, obviously like you know feeding into that the game has branching points where you have to make choices. And like a character will come in and there’ll be… it’ll be a choice of two items that you can give her and obviously then the narrative branches and we sort of go in different directions and I think we’ve got eight possibly eight eight endings maybe nine endings in the game. And you know, each one has different end states for each of the characters, but it’s based off the end. I think there can only ever be nine separate endings like each one with that kind of summary sheet. 

GC: Okay.

John:  Where some people might…

Rob: No, the summary sheet will be different. 

John: Oh, really? 

Rob: (For like ) the same ending. Yeah. Because there are, you know, there are some characters that…  minor characters that you might have made a different choice with. 

GC: So that doesn’t meaningfully affect the main ending. 

Rob: Right, yeah. 

GC: Okay. Wow. So there’s the nine big endings and then that can have an assortment of character outcomes within the big ending. 

Rob: Right, exactly. 

GC: That is a huge amount of branching. 

Rob: Yeah. Yeah. It’s not… it’s slightly less complicated than it sounds perhaps in terms of the branching. It’s you know there yeah there are certain decision points during the game as John says and again like you know that branch branching it is really really difficult again because you don’t want to run into a scenario where you know you you might need an item on one branch and you whatever like it it yeah it’s complicated fitting it into this sort of framework but we obviously We we kind of learned how to do that from Strange Horticulture to a degree and kind of..

John: Yeah. But you make it sound like that we learned and it made it easier but it’s a tool like I think arguably it was harder this time round. Again I… I don’t know why but it was.

GC: All right. Now this is just a detail that I absolutely loved and I got to know how it ended up in the game. If I look left and right in the shop, it’s not like I’m turning my eyes. It’s like I’m picking up the whole shop and moving it because all of the hanging items swing back and forth. Why is that in the game? 

Rob: I kind of… I almost don’t want to admit this because well, no, obviously I will, but it was… it was basically an accident. I didn’t intend for it to be like that. I put the code for pendulums swinging into the game and I noticed that it was doing this and it was only afterwards and and but I, you know, I saw it and I was like, well, it shouldn’t technically be doing that, but it does look kind of cool, so I think I’m just going to leave it in. And yeah, the reason is that instead of ‘cause… so I can either move the camera right in the back end, I can move the camera around the shot or I can move the shelves. But because when you go down to the desk, that’s… that moves the camera down. But then moving the shelves is like a separate thing. I don’t want to move the camera across when I’m on the desk view. So, the easy solution there is to simply move the shelves, which means that by a happy accident, I’m moving the whole world, which means that the pendulums start swaying just because they… their position moves in the world. 

John: But it creates this kind of like extra tactile quality to everything, you know, like just having things like moving and stuff and like there’s something about Strange Horticulture. We had the plants were all swaying and stuff, but these are static items. It’s like how can we create life? And one of the… the things I think that does that is just having the… the talisman, the pendants kind of just sway when you pick them up and put them down and when you move the shop around. And I just yeah, it feels… I don’t know. It feels more enjoyable as a player when you’re kind of navigating it around. Even though maybe it doesn’t entirely make sense. Though that said, we’ve always maintained like the shop itself is an… is a thing is almost like an entity. I mean, there are some puzzles which require I mean, it’s not a spoiler to say there are some plinths in the counter and that one of the puzzles involves putting items on plinths and then you can go to other locations in your shop and the way we do that is we slam the shelves together and you mysteriously get to a different bit. I mean, so it’s… there is a kind of like, I don’t know, magical quality to the way the shop sort of moves around. 

GC: Well, according to the lore, the town was built around the shop, so that’s not a huge surprise. 

Rob: Yeah. Yeah. And nobody really knows who built it or how old it is. 

GC:There you go. Actually, when you’re talking about moving up and down to your… the desk you look down at, I did notice that the controls are much more, kind of, intuitive and user friendly than they were in Strange Horticulture. Like the way you… you put the… the magnifying glass on the mouse wheel this time. So, it’s very easy to just zip into that. The ambidextrous controls in the keyboard. Was that based on feedback from people who played Strange Horticulture? 

Rob: I mean partly that just came out of extending the layout. ‘Cause obviously Strange Horticulture is just that single screen. But this time we wanted to put the characters front and center and have the dialogue text a little bit bigger so it’s, you know, not quite as hard to read on smaller devices. so then you know as an extension of that then the desk goes below the main shop window so now you have to move it around. But then yeah so it kind of came out of that, and yeah obviously there… there was some feedback on Strange Horticulture that we had tried to address as well. And some feedback from people playing the demo of Strange Antiquities that we’ve already been able to address. You know stuff like people struggled with exiting various menus. They wanted to press escape, which I always thought that the default for escape would be to bring up the you know the system menu. But we’ve made it so that that will also exit menus and then it will only bring up the system menu if you’re kind of if you’re not in one of those…

GC: And you’re… you’re in the neutral screen. Okay. 

Rob: Yeah, yeah. 

GC: Yeah. I did hit escape a lot. You’re right. Yeah. 

Rob: Yeah. Well, yeah. Players… players wanted it. So, yeah. So obviously having as much play testing as possible allows, you know, enables us to find those kind of points of friction and… and allows us to smooth them out as much as we can. You know, we’re not going to be able to get everything, but we do the best we can. 

GC: Okay. What kind of work went into designing the game’s maps? Like you talked about some of the inspirations with Consulting Detective, but what I was intrigued by was that all three of the maps you’ve chosen to do in completely different art styles. 

John: Yeah, I mean, well, I mean, it’s funny you say that. I never intended them to be different art styles, but I suppose, like, they’re designed by different map designers. What we… the key thing was we wanted each map to feel different to the last one, right? And… and that extends back to Strange Horticulture as well. We… When we designed that map, you know, when you’re going out looking for flowers, it always felt like it needed to be a wide area. And we set our game in the Lake District in the UK and you go up The Fells and you find rare plants and you bring them back to your shop. And it was all done on a grid- based layout and the puzzles were all all around this kind of grid system. We kind of were like, well, we’ve done that grid layout. We did as many grid kind of based puzzles as we could think of in that game. And we were like, we don’t want to do that again. So what can we do differently? And I mean early on we were like well we’ll just set this in Undermere itself like focus it makes more sense. And (I) really like the idea of doing a street layout map for that. And then we kind of like people loved exploring the maps. Let’s add more. What else can we do? And it was just about trying to find other ideas which would offer us the ability to do different kinds of puzzles. So yeah, again like we don’t want to entirely spoil it for people because I think part of what’s fun playing the game is coming across the different maps as you go through the game and like oh what’s this one got in it and it’s like cool. 

GC: Well, there is definitely a… a spoilery question I would like to ask you about the… the underground map, but I’m definitely not going to do it here. 

Rob: Okay. Sure. 

GC: It was a… it was such a delight to come on that third map and just doing everyone has its own completely different kind of puzzle because for the… the town map it kind of makes sense. You’re asking people who lives across from where? What are the streets named, right? What is north, south, east, and west of place? But then the… for the mansion, right, you’re suddenly asking yourself, okay, now I’m imagining myself walking through this space. Whereas when you get into the underground, it’s all about lore and history. And it’s because it’s interesting because it’s not just three different locations, it’s three different kinds of puzzles. 

John: Yeah. Yeah. And then on top of it, there’s another puzzle, which is when you get a clue card, we don’t tell you which map it is, so you have to kind of analyze it and work out which one we’re talking about. 

GC: Yeah, that was a lot of fun, not going to lie, getting through all the clue cards. Well, the embarrassing part is, you know, you get the first clue card before you know, you get it right away and you’re like, what the… what does this mean? Is this a story thing? What is going on? 

Rob: Yeah. 

GC: It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out it was a map reference. 

Rob: That’s that’s interesting. Yeah. 

GC:Yeah. 

Rob: Obviously, yeah. Well, that’s again that’s part of the game and that’s part of, you know, it’s that coming back to that Ron Gilbert quote of we don’t want to tell people that, we… we don’t want to signpost it. We want players to have those ah kind of moments and and work it out for themselves. 

GC: Oh, and all right, here’s… here’s a kind of related question just for the player experience. Have you considered adding in a new game plus mode where after they’ve gotten the trophy for unlocking every single item when they restart the game, they can just have everything pre-labeled so they can speedrun getting the different endings they want? 

Rob: So yes, we have considered it. I mean, if it’s just a case of pre-labeled, uh, that’s certainly a lot easier. The part of the reason that we haven’t done that yet, as in, so that feature doesn’t exist yet, is because there’s just two of us and making a game and finishing a game is a lot of work. And that is obviously like there’s… for the big fan for the you know our core fans of the game. We want to be able to give them those sorts of features but it’s not necessarily a core feature for the game. So they’re kind of like really nice to haves but yeah we’re not going to prioritize it until we’ve kind of done everything else basically. So yes, we… we would like to add those sorts of features but they’re not there yet. 

John: There… I would also like (to) point out for anyone playing that is interested in trying to find the different endings, it doesn’t require you to always restart the game from the beginning. We… in the save system, we do have save points at every day. So you can kind of go back in to a maybe where if you make a note of where a branch was or like certainly at the end like when you get to the end of the game there’s kind of a choice to make on where you go to kind of do your ending. Like there’s like different places where ending points can happen. So you can kind of try out the… those different branches by just going back a day and trying them different. You don’t have to play the whole game through again. It’s just like some of the more… 

Rob: If you have… if you have, you know, set up the choices to be able to unlock that ending at all, but yes.

John: That’s true. Yeah, I forget that… there are other bits further back like that can have an impact on where you can go at the end. And…

GC: I definitely did not have a choice of where to go at the end. So, obviously, I screwed something up. Okay. Do you guys have a third installment in the series in mind? Can fans expect to be like running a strange pet shop or a strange bakery in 2028? 

Rob: We, I mean, we… Yeah, we’re not committing to anything at this point, but I don’t want to think that we’re done with Strange or we’re done with Undermere in particular. So, yeah, we… we hope to come back to it, but we’re yeah, we’re… we’re you know, we’re we’re toying with ideas behind the scenes definitely. 

John: At the same time, we’ve been working in… on the strange universe now for five years and part of us is kind of like exhausted with it and needs to kind of maybe park it for a bit. So whether we go straight into, like, thinking about that or whether we sort of pivot for a bit, I don’t know. It’s like this is, you know, we’ve been so focused on finishing Strange Antiquities, getting it out, making the best game we could make. That kind of those conversations about what we do for a third game like we have like had them like little ones from time to time but nothing like properly serious like we are definitely going to do that next you know so it’s like we we we do obviously really hope and especially like well it depends kind of like how people see perceive Strange Antiquities when it comes out if people are loving it and want more and there’s a real appetite for it. It kind of makes us feel like…like well we… we ought to, you know, but if it’s really disappointing, well, may… maybe we’ve had enough. 

GC: Well, you’ve been living in this world for 5 years, So like, roughly how much work have you done on the lore and backstory of this world? Like how much do you know about this world that has never been revealed in the games? 

Rob: To be honest, I think most of that does go into the game in some way. The… Yeah, we… Yeah, I think I think it goes into the game. Like there’s… there’s some lore and stuff that we’ve written that doesn’t obviously, but…

John: But those are more like story ideas that we had like that have been dropped. We’re not like the kind of I guess like TV show designers that have planned out series 1 to 5 and they know where it’s going. We… we’ve made series 1, we’ve made series 2, and now the network says, you need to do three more series. Oh, right. Like, yeah, maybe we need to think about it some more. 

GC: You’re building the railroad as you’re going down it. 

John: Yeah, I think I think that’s definitely more of the approach. We, you know, like, I love the idea of sort of Undermere adjacent stories and, like, and things like that… that you know, writing some stories about the world like that kind of go into the history a bit more and stuff like that. That’ll be really cool to do. 

Rob: One certainly one thing that we have really enjoyed this time round is because it’s a sequel, we can kind of reference back to Strange Horticulture. So there’s quite a few little references dotted back to that game in this one. so you know for fans of the first game, I think you’ll spot a few of those things. Um…

GC: it was nice to be able to go to Strange Horticulture in the (game) 

Rob: Yes. Well, exactly. So that’s… that’s one of one of the little Easter eggs. You can actually visit the shop in this one. And there’s yeah, there’s quite a few little things like that and some like… Yeah, I really enjoyed putting those extra lore elements in there that tie back into the first game and kind of some of them might answer some questions. Like I think one of my favorite ones, I guess I don’t want to spoil it too much, but it’s not a big spoiler. There is the great oak in Strange Horticulture, which is never really explained. It’s just something that’s marked on your map. It’s this huge oak tree. And if you are paying attention in this game, you know, there are some small clues about where that came from. Which, you know, it’s… it’s a minor detail, but we really enjoyed peppering those sorts of things in. 

GC: Yeah, lots of mysterious items with oak handles in the game. 

Rob: Right? 

GC: Definitely tying in if you were go through the book carefully. All right, Sophie’s choice time. You have to pick one cat. Hellebore or Jupiter. 

Rob: Oh gosh, what are you doing to us? It’s… I think it’s Jupiter for me. I think…

John: Oh, you see, I would…

Rob: I’m sorry. (I’m sorry Hellebore)

John: I mean, Jupiter now, like it’s hard to I do love Jupiter with his heterachromia and, obviously my he looks quite… a substantially better visually. My art stuff has improved and things, but I do still really have a soft spot for Hellebore. Especially ‘cause he was such, like, a last minute addition to Strange Horticulture. He’s he was not, you know, there from the start. It was like when we were we basically had the game mostly there like in terms of you know…

GC:  All the mechanics, all the content? 

JOhn: All the mechanics and all the not all the content but like certainly all the mechanics and then we were like something’s missing like what is it? And it’s like, yeah, a cat obviously like that. It’s got to have a cat. Like… And then we like, well, can it just be a cat that just didn’t… it doesn’t really have anything to do with the game, but it’s just there. Yeah, why not? Like, just throw it in. And like, it just… it was such a… a winning addition. I  genuinely believe that Strange Horticulture would not have seen the success it has if Hellebore had not been a part of it. 

Rob: Yeah, it’s… it’s kind of shocking how long it took us to realize that this game needed a cat.

GC: Well, I’m glad you did because that purr and that petting is… is always a pleasure to do. 

Rob: Yeah. 

John: Yeah. 

GC: And of course, Jupiter has a bigger role, which I won’t spoil in this game, than Hellebore had in that one. Big question though, the game is coming out. What is the most important thing that you want people to know about the game? Like what is the thing like this is what makes this special to us and this is why we are desperate to share it with you. What are you most excited for people to see?

Rob: That is… that is an incredibly difficult question to answer. I think just the love that we have poured into this over, you know, three years of hard work. And yeah, I think, you know, I just I hope it comes through in all the little details that we’ve put into the game. 

John: Yeah. I mean, we’re just incredibly excited to share it now with people. It gets to a point where you start like you… you’re really proud of your work and then the more you work on it, it starts to, like, go the other way and you kind of want to kick it into the sun at times. And now I I’m just I really wanted to get it to people to show like one the progression like that we’ve made ‘cause I think whilst you know I look back at Strange Horticulture I think we made a pretty good game and obviously you know from people’s perception of it like it clearly resonated with a lot of people but I think we have just taken that and you really improved it on almost in every aspect. Well, at least from my point of view. Like visually, it’s a step up. Like in terms of like the puzzles and the way those (are) done, it’s a step up. Like I just so I just hope people see that as well and enjoy and enjoy it as much as Strange Horticulture and hopefully more. 

GC: Okay. Well, thank you so much for doing this. I’ve learned a lot about the game and as someone who just finished it, I can confirm that it is very much just… Everything you loved about Strange Horticulture has just been moved a leap forward in design this time around. Everything…

Rob: (That’s) very very kind of you to say so. Thank you so much.

GC: Of course!

John: Yeah, that obviously that is what we were hoping for but it’s… it’s lovely to hear honestly. 

GC: No, but I mean the design it’s… it’s so much more playable and so much more in-depth without losing any of the charm. That’s the thing. It really feels like an extension of the world. Yeah. While all of the gameplay mechanics have just taken an amazing leap forward. So, congratulations on how it turned out. 

Rob: Thank you so much. 

GC: Okay. and of course, when is the game releasing and what can people play it on? 

Rob: It’s out on September 17th. And it’s coming to Steam and Switch first, and hopefully other platforms later. 

GC: Okay. Thank you so much for your time and I encourage everybody if they haven’t yet, check out the demo immediately. You don’t have the exploration gameplay, but you do have everything, all the other main parts of the game. 

Rob: Uh, yeah. Well, the exploration is there as well. You just, you know, you have to find that map first, but it’s there. 

GC: Oh, it is. Oh my god. You’re kidding me. 

Rob: No, it’s there. 

GC: I thought it wasn’t there. Oh my god. 

Rob: That but that’s again. Yeah, some people don’t find it. Some people do. 

GC: Apparently, I’m also bad at the demo. Oh, thanks so much. Thanks for watching. Be sure to check out the links for more accessible reviews, interviews, and features at Gamecritics. Also, like the video and subscribe so you get notified whenever new content drops. We’ll see you back here for more. But until then, au revoir!

The post VIDEO INTERVIEW: Bad Viking on Strange Antiquities appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

TRANSCRIPT:

GameCritics.com: Hello everyone, welcome back. This is Eugene Sax for GameCritics.com coming to you again with another interview. Since we’ve been kind of on a kick for interviews here lately. One in particular, so this was a game that was brought to my attention. It was an automation game, which is not a genre I’m most familiar with in the world, but definitely the visuals and the “vibe”. Haha, that’ll make sense in a minute for this game. Kind of kind of took me, hooked me really quick and kind of wanted to get into the game a little more. And I’ve had the pleasure of being able to go ahead and interview the developer here. So, my apologies, Manik?

Unwise (Manik Bhat): Yeah, you got her super close, Manik. But I’ve heard every pronunciation under the sun that sometimes I forget how to say it. So you’re spot on.

GC: All right, perfect. So yes, Manik Bhat, thank you so much for joining me here.

Unwise: Of course. No, thanks so much for inviting me. Excited to be here.

GC: Yeah, so why don’t we get started with the easy questions? So what got you into games and what got you into gaming as like a hobby?

Unwise: Yeah, I mean I I think my earliest memories I have are sitting next to my brother, watching him play Starcraft and M.A.X.: Mechanized Assault on the PC and Descent.

GC: Mhm.

Unwise: And so I fell in love with technology and games from that point onwards, and and played a lot of genres, but I always tended to go towards strategy, RTS, simulation games. And that’s why I’ve been, you know, about the story of, Future Vibe Check. I feel like there’s been this (emergence) of Buildy Crafty automation games over the past decade, and I love that. And another big part of my love since since pretty early life has been music. And I figured how about we combine both. Yeah. And that’s really the gen… how the genesis of Future Vibe Check happened.

GC: Gotcha. Okay. Very cool. ‘Cause yeah, like I said, I haven’t been the biggest into automation games kind of myself. So I definitely after I played yours took a deep dive in kind of some of the other big names out there just so I can get a little more familiar with it myself, and it sounds like from it’s mostly just the love of those games essentially is what kind of made Future Vibe Check and your love of music it sounds like too. Do you actually have like a background in music yourself or…?

Unwise: Yeah. Yeah. I feel like my the three biggest hobbies in my life that have sustained me have been music, video games and philos… like weird esoteric eastern philosophy. So, I’m like this is kind of a love letter to a younger version of myself of like what I would love if I was playing this when I was younger. So yeah, I played music all my life. So I I I own like a bunch of instruments. Play piano, guitar. I own a dejembe, a ukulele, a sitar, a banjo, bunch of random stuff. I can only really play guitar well. I would only say that. And I wish I could sing. I’m not I wish I was a vocalist. (I) can’t, Only my mom thinks I’m a good singer.

GC: Mhm.

Unwise: …and my wife. But it’s it it’s it’s something I wish I could do. But, this has been a way to reconnect with that early part of myself because I feel like after college, I didn’t really get time to play music at all. Yeah, because there’s no one to play with and it’s I was in a really small rinky dink apartment in New York, so I had none of my instruments with me. So, this was a way to kind of reconnect with my musical past in a way.

GC: Gotcha. Yeah. I also grew up playing music as well. I only had trumpet, as far as the instrument that I actually played a lot of. Dabbled a little bit in guitar there near the end of high school, beginning of college, but I never really threw myself into it. And I kind of wish I did ’cause that would have been a good skill to have. But always have liked all kinds of different kind of music as well. So I completely get the music thing behind it. So I guess tell me what in what was the inspiration for wanting to get into game development? Was it just that love for all of these things and the thought of, hey, what can I do to put them all together or was there something else that triggered that desire?

Unwise: Yeah. Yeah, I think it was a few things. I felt like so I was at a you know a change in my career path. I’d spent a decade in healthcare startups. So I had built a healthcare startup for nearly a decade. Went through that entire journey and kind of very gratefully and luckily that journey went well. So I was kind of confronted with this path of what I want to do next. And for me the big driving force in my mind was I want to build something that a younger version of myself would have loved. And it’s like games were the answer. And it was a completely different creative direction for me to learn something new, try something new, and just combine the things that I spent most of my time with outside of work, which was games and music. So that was one big, you know, area that I wanted to explore was giving something back. The second big thing was I felt like I I I would spend so much time in these building games and crafting and automation games, but that investment never translated to the real world. Like I would build these massive factories and like it would be cool. It’d be awesome. Love those games. But I’m like, okay, music is so universal. Imagine if what you built and spent so much time investing in could be experienced in the real world and could be shared with others in the real world. And music I felt was like the closest connection point for that where I spent 50 hours making this crazy composition and factory and Future Vibe Check. Well, now I can hear it and you know, share with others. The third big thing I was really interested in was how do kind of I I’ve I’ve been a bit worried about what happens in the next 10-15 years to human creativity when it’s so easy to make stuff with AI. And I feel like most people are not going to spend time learning music theory or reading a piece of sheet music or even learning a DAH — a desktop audio workstation like others. So like imagine if there’s a new way to play with music in a new musical notation system in a game format. And that’s a big driving force for me too, which is hey now you can like visualize rhythm, you can visualize pitch, you can do all these things. So that those are the probably the three big pillars that that made me want to start this thing.

GC: Gotcha. Yeah. Very cool, and that’s very kind of obvious from the kind of design that you do it. like you have so many tools that make it very easy to kind of get into that just from starting up. It’s a little slow to start, but that could just be my lack of knowledge in the game. But…

Unwise: No, no, you’re right. I mean, like the it’s it’s so the the toughest part of this game has been tutorialization and flow.

GC: Mhm.

Unwise: …And it’s so hard to get right ’cause some players get it so quickly. Some players are like, “This is this is so handholdy. What the heck?” and trying to strike that right balance is something that I’m still trying to figure out what’s the right way to balance the some of the game design to get to the aha moment faster. So, you’re not alone there. I don’t think we’ve solved it just yet. I have another update actually coming out in a week or two that I I think gets a lot closer to what I think the ideal state is for that early game. But yeah, because it’s like it’s automation mechanics which are already a bit complicated and now there’s music on top and there’s node based composition. It’s like there’s a lot of systems and there’s a base defense system. It’s like what the heck? There’s a lot going on. So finding the right, you know, a smooth entry point is probably the toughest and and the UX and UI of all of that is the toughest challenge we face, before we move towards a release date.

GC: Yeah. Gotcha. Very cool. Yeah, I’m think like the there was a part of the tutorial that I got a little stuck on. And I was able to do some of the other stuff because in the demo you give multiple kind of… I guess tutorial missions I’ll call it that you’re able to do. But like I’m interested in kind of the design behind it. This kind of goes into my next question as far as like what went into the music and sound design for this game especially with a lot of automation. So it is about that kind of flow state. You have the place where you’re pulling the resources from. You’re then refining the resources then using those to make something else. But the kind of interesting thing about this is because it is music based and music has its own kind of tempo to it. Like you have to do it on specific beats and everything like that. So one in particular I was getting stuck on was trying to get the correct set of beats to come through. And maybe I was just trying to do something a little too… little too advanced at the moment because I had like I had two going on just like a like a one measure type of rhythm and then another one trying to do like a two and a half or something like that. So maybe it was just me doing it. But kind of tell me a little bit more about what went into kind of how you program for that because I can imagine trying to combine those two together was a bit of a bit of a tough bit of a tough thing there.

Unwise: Yeah. No, it’s it’s definitely, you know, the systems in the game and and this is like me being biased being the creator of this, but it’s like automation games in itself are tough to build because of scalability and and all the systems. And so that was kind of one big area of problem, which is how do you build all these automation systems, conveyor belts, management, crafting, all these different loops. But the the the first big layer was the procedural music system itself and getting that pretty robust. And a lot of that is is is built and not even shared with the player yet in the game because I’m just building the UI to expose some of these parameters to the player. But the procedial music system in the background allows you to like play anything and sound decently correct in the right Key, Scale, Mode… Manages chord progressions, progression rates, you know, you know, tritone substitutions. it goes pretty deep in in music theory in the background. So that was one big, you know, big piece of engineering that had to be done that I feel pretty happy about where it’s at now. Relying on a lot of powerful I I’m stepping and then using the foundation of other people who’ve built some amazing systems. So there’s a lot of open source code there. Excited to share more of the code base and and doing some random dev blogs about it as well. But then the the way we got to where we are game design wise was a lot of iteration. There are versions of the game where we first looked at how music is currently produced on a linear timeline. So we had items on belts that moved along the game map and then got played at an endpoint and everything was super linear. And the problem with that was it made it really hard for players to change music on the fly which kind of defeated the purpose of the game. So then we explored and I happened upon node-based composition systems. And what those are is basically sounds are played via a grid. And being in a game environment, you have so much opportunity to encode cool music information like pitch and rhythm visually in a game world. And it works really well with a grid. So once we started going down the path of node-based composition, it opened up a lot of doors because it played well with the spatial reasoning and logistics puzzles that already exist in these automation games where now not only are you trying to optimize your production, but the way you optimize your production is linked to the music you’re creating. And the music you’re creating is really linked to the decisions you’re making in terms of placement and your operating model in the game world. And that’s a game where you have to optimize okay, do I move these nodes here to get closer, but do I really want to do that to sacrifice maybe some the rhythm that I really want? And the goal behind all those systems is how do we maintain the efficiency loop of automation, but how do we also incentivize the subjective experience of music play and playfulness of music creativity at the same time? So that was a big big unlock from a game design perspective of layering node based, grid-based composition on top of the commonplace mechanics and automation games like crafting and belt logistics systems and and and so on and so forth. The other big one that we have which is I’m excited about is this concept of gener… karma generation rates. So, I don’t know if you’ve gotten this far yet, but in the game when you play an item, you have this loop of crafting items. The better item you create, the more reward you get, and the reward value decreases based on how many resource gatherers are kind of consuming that value from your, you know, music network. Okay.

GC: Yeah.

Unwise: The other big variable playing with is, okay, so now you have a rate of how much you’re making every measure, every minute. That rate is linked to the damage of your towers.

GC: Mhmm.

Unwise: …And so now you have this light loop, strategic loop of, okay, so I’m managing these node networks that are growing to capture resources. That sense, but now I need to be super efficient because the more efficient I am, the more damage I’m doing.

GC: Mhm.

Unwise: So there are a ton of ways to play the game. And that’s kind of the beauty of these types of automation games is you can take it at your own pace and you can beat the game and be super inefficient with a bunch of spaghetti factories everywhere or you can be really efficient. But the other big part of what we’ve been focused on is how do we flip the narrative on the head of is this game endless growth at all costs? Or maybe the answer is how do you actually achieve a balance of your production and your consumption of the resources and the music you produced. You can’t overengineer, you can’t undergener. And I’m really excited about that because it’s not just, you know, number go up for production, but it kind of reinforces some of these spiritual themes we have going on in the game of, well, maybe the answer is actually a healthy balance. Maybe the answer is, hey, we need to make sure that what we consume produces to the level we expect it to. And endless growth at all costs might not be the ultimate solution for what we’re trying to achieve, in the game, let alone the world. So, I’m pretty excited about how players interact with these systems that are all interconnected. You can’t grow and gather resources without subtracting a level of your reward resource. you can’t defend without subtracting a level of your rate. And so you have to balance all of these while you’re managing the music you want to produce and hear at the same time.

GC: Okay. Gotcha. So, and you you you set me up perfectly for my next question. Like the combat behind it. I didn’t get enough into the demo quite yet to get to the point where I could start doing combat. Like it was just introduced and I have vibe stealers around kind of messing… Well, I say messing with my stuff, but it seems like really they’re just like picking up some of the like initial resources and then just kind of walking around with them, but they aren’t necessarily like stopping anything. It’s like a very light element as far as what’s going into it. So, I mean, do do players have to interact with that combat at all or could they just let the vibe stealers kind of run rampant and still be able to get to, I guess, whatever the end state is?

Unwise: Yeah. So, we’re… like player choice is really important to me. So, at release, one, players can turn off the entire vibe stealer loop if they want. So, they have that option.

GC: Yeah.

Unwise: The second layer is the vibe stealers are never going to stop your base outright. They’re just going to mess with your production, make you slightly more inefficient. And so, you could choose to just harmonize with them and just build around them like, “Hey, you know, five stealers, go have your items. It’s fine, and you’re just chilling and I’ll just overproduce a bit more and it’s all good. Yeah. Or you can choose to actually, you know, fight them, combat them. Right now we have those, you know, vibe stealers that kind of float and they’re actually, fun fact, they’re animated based on a sine wave, which is kind of similar to the bass wave of a yeah of a synth that you’re going to you can actually make a synth in the game, which is like my favorite feature. So all a lot of the animations use sine wave fun, but anyway, so they they they steal your items, they go back. The other vibe stealer we have is a power stealer. So it goes in and actually like dis, depowers cells in your base. Okay, and then the third one we’re playing around with is one that just turns off your factories for a brief moment in time and then turns like messes with your production a bit if you have some rates going.

GC: Mhm.

Unwise: So nothing outright as in terms of I will destroy your base.

GC: Yeah.

Unwise: Right. Because I think that’s too much pressure in in kind of fights against some of the mechanics of the game. I wanted the vibes dealers to be here is one, you know, for me, I was like, I like tower defense games. Like, oh, it would be so cool if your music drives tower defense. And that was one thing I just ran with it. It’s probably the least formed version part of the game so far, but it’s like my white white whale, where I’m like, I want this to work and it’s going to work. But it just needs a lot more development and polish for it to really come to life. Sure. But that’s the idea. Here’s a light pressure mechanic for people to play with more music and and and and optimize different things. So yeah, in in a way kind of like exactly like you said, you could just harmonize with it and not really interact with it. But if you want to be the most efficient, then maybe you should. Exactly. A most efficiently like I’m going to line up in a beat of percussion right at their spawn point and right when they pop out of their spawn point, they’re just dead like that. You could do that.

GC: Yeah. Very cool. So, I guess kind of piggybacking off of that again, kind of weaving in a lot of these things together, which thank you for setting me up so perfectly for this. So, like as I’m looking into a lot of the other automation games, kind of preparing to be able to talk with you and be a little more knowledgeable about the genre and that… yeah, is there actually an end state to Future Vibe Check? Like I’m thinking in a lot of other cases like there’s the Factorios, there is your Satisfactory which I guess that kind of occupies a slightly different space by comparison because that’s I think it kind of goes on to puzzle game at least a little bit. But then like Dyson Sphere or Satisfactory or something like that. I feel as though those actually have a somewhat defined end state where Future Vibe Check it almost seems like kind of like music itself. There’s not like the music and the factory is never done. It is just abandoned. Kind of in that like creative like fine art space. Is that true or is there actually going to be like an end state that players can interact with?

Unwise: There is going to be an end state. You’re going to… So, one is you’re going to be able to there’s quite a few more unlocks that are that are planned and already built but not in the demo like effects management, reverb, echo, flanging, high pass, low pass filters, things like that. There’s more modification of synth instruments, more modification of progression and discrete melodies, sound recording, vocal recording, autotune. So there’s like a whole set of progression around that narrative of unlocking your chakras.

GC: Mhm.

Unwise: There’s a bit of a narrative. The narrative is very early right now, as you can tell. I just give a little bit of snippets of what the characters kind of feel like to get feed… honestly feedback on the alpha, what people like about the characters or don’t like about the characters.

GC: Yeah.

Unwise: Just to guide the direction of the narrative going forward. But the end state is going to be you will have your musical factory, but the vibe you’re producing does have a purpose that will be narratively explained. And at the end of the game, you’re going to have a a version of your factory unlocked that you previously could not access and a version of music theory that you previously could not access. And so one way to think about that is, you know, we’re so used to seeing music theory in the lens of there’s 12 pitches to play with and and keys and scales, but there’s other forms of music theory that have a lot more crayons in the crayon box, like 22, 23 plus pitches. And so part of the endgame is you’re powering this factory, you’re making your synths. Now you’ve unlocked all your chakras and you now have the ability to make music in a completely different way than we’re exposed to. So that’s kind of that’ll be kind of narratively explained as well, but that’s going to be kind of the end game. You’re breaking free from the confines of music theory into a new way to think about music music theory at the end game.

GC: Okay, gotcha. And that that’s good to hear because like I at least just as a personal some of the games where it is just like you just make your own fun that I kind I end up bouncing off of it eventually. Like I’ll put in like a couple hours into it, but I… I always use the analogy like I need, I treat games like I need Lego sets. Like I need a set that gives me instructions. if you just give me a big box of Legos, like I’ll build like a very symmetrical like square house, but that’s like that’s all I can go for because then it’s like okay, like where where am I going forward with this? Like I need like some type of goal if that makes sense.

Unwise: 100%. And that’s why how I think about it is like that player ’cause I’m actually more like that player too. The idea is that core mode will be here’s the progression, here are the goals to get you to point A to point B and by point B you have accomplished a lot. You’ll have a full functioning music composition with your own custom synths, your own effects. You’ll understand how they work. You’ll have an efficient way of building harmonies and you’re going to understand new forms of music theory. And then, but the players that actually like just tinkering have the creative mode where there’s no progression. And there’s actually some crazy stuff people have built.

GC: Yeah.

Unwise: In that mode that I like, there’s one person, a couple people in (the Discord)… KingofDranovis and Saronin. Shout out. And it was funny because like one of them was like I encountered a bug and I’m like oh weird. I can understand how the bug worked and I loaded their save and I see this like 60 splitters in like weird probability generation. I’m like this is like I understand why there’s a bug now. Like I did not plan for (that)… Yeah. But that stuff excites me because I I do think there’s going to be some cool stuff.

GC: Yeah. And I I do want to get back to like the the kind of community aspect of that here in a second, but I did see kind of look through some of the devlogs and that before we got started that yeah, you just introduced the like community saves where you can upload to the cloud and then someone else can then bring it down and kind of listen to the music and I think that is so appropriate for this type of style of game and I do want to come back to that in a second. Sticking with the game itself though, yeah, so we know it there’s part of your love for automation games. We know there is your love for music. Tell tell me more about the religious kind of side of it or the it it’s like a you said it was like eastern like Hinduism I believe I kind of was gathering from some of your other things or maybe a little more focused but…

Unwise: Yeah no it pulls from a lot of different things. I didn’t want to be you know overtly tied to a specific religious faith. Sure. ‘Cause I’m not that way. I I think I I pull different things that I found meaning in my life that have been useful. And and the whole idea behind that was one I feel like in an increasingly confusing world having some tentpoles of how to understand it is helpful.

GC: Mhm.

Unwise: And for me personally I found some of these the tra… some of the the concepts in these traditions from both east and west and the wisdom found there to be very helpful in maneuvering through my own life. And I always felt that gaming games didn’t really tap into that in any way, either from the artistic style or the symbology or the the narrative or the characters. So, I wanted to find a way to see how do I bring like this weird cyberpunk aesthetic and sprinkle it with some of this eastern wisdom that could be helpful or at least spark some curiosity in someone to explore more.

GC: Yeah.

Unwise: And so that’s kind of the the goal, is exposing some of these concepts, whether it be the concepts of karma or the concepts of achieving some form of enlightenment or finding ways to reduce your level of ego to maneuver through the world more effectively, without suffering. I I wanted to play with those ideas and see how can I include those because I think they are actually quite well juxtaposed to the core idea of an automation game which is growth and and so I wanted to find some level of dichotomy between growth and balance which I think is a you know common phrase used in a lot (of religions).

GC: Yeah.

Unwise: So that’s that’s kind of the for for me personally I I usually follow the philosophical tradition called Advita Vidanta which is a from a kind of an offshoot of Hinduism which is kind of a a non material view of the world. So you see more of a reflection of that specific philosophical (thought) in the game. So, it it’s kind of a it’s pulled from a lot of different things that I enjoy from these traditions and ideally by the end narrative, there’s a consistent thread of point A to point B of where you started and and where you end, and yeah, I’m curious what what you thought of the character so far. Did what what made sense to you, what didn’t make sense to you? I’m cur… curious from a player’s perspective.

GC: Yeah. And I do like I was able to get the like the ideas of that kind of balance pretty quickly and it makes sense now as far as the growth aspect that you were trying to focus on there especially with the automation ’cause of course you know you start humble beginnings you have your one belt your one resource manager your one item that then starts the music for whatever it is but then of course you you get more resources you build more you refine you make it more efficient or you you just sprawl out. But in any case, it’s still that like growth and balance at the same time because you need to make sure all the resources are constantly flowing in a way that will still power your factory. So, I did get that, like it makes sense. I’m starting to connect the dots a little bit there. I definitely love the aesthetic to it. As far as like I’m in the same vein, like I have kind of peeked at a bunch of different like world religions and that kind of stuff just from a curiosity standpoint. Yeah. And especially like thinking to your point as far as games don’t really show that off very well, like a lot of them are like edutainment games, right? Like I’m thinking of one particular like Super Noah’s Ark which is like a a Doom clone essentially but it is just just Noah going through the ark, right? And I think a lot of them kind of go into that way or they go almost the complete opposite like Saturday morning super villain essentially like I’m thinking the Bayonettas of the world where it is yes you are fighting angels or devils or something like that but they are like so over the top. But Future Vibe Check does seem a little more grounded in a way. Yeah, exactly like you said like not necessarily for one individual religion but it is very easy to understand and it is more I guess realistic is the best way to say it. Like it’s not over the top. It is just like the everyday kind of thought. As far as the characters specifically like I’m seeing in your background here DJ Otter.

Unwise: DJ Otter!

GC: Yeah, that character is great. I love DJ Otter.

Unwise: That’s awesome. God has a lot of plans for him. He see he’s a little mischievous. You got to watch out for DJ Otter. He is. He is. You never know.

GC: And and I was kind of going to a couple of different videos kind of seeing like what else you’ve talked about with other people. And I stopped pretty quickly because I’m like, “No, I just want to kind of go in this as blind as I can.” But I wanted to kind of get an idea from you as far as like so there’s the Infinite which is kind of the like omnipresent just kind of like hey just let them let them do their thing and see what comes of it. You have your that kind of black spirally like I guess character with his own gravity and that and he kind of argues a little bit with DJ Otter like where did that I’m assuming there’s some inspiration behind that as far as maybe from a religious standpoint specifically.

Unwise: Yeah absolutely. So you know the DJ otter and the Conductor…

GC: Conductor, thank you.

Unwise:…are basically yeah yeah yeah they’re basically taking the form of something from the Buddhist concept of the Bodhisattva which is basically someone who has in their own mind achieved some level of enlightenment but has chosen to stay on the material world to teach others or serve others.

GC: Mhm.

Unwise: So they haven’t reached full enlightenment Buddhahood, but kind of one step below. And I’m I’m I’m oversimplifying it, but that’s kind of a core idea.

GC: Yeah.

Unwise: And so the idea behind there is that they have a bit of an antagonizing relationship because they both reach that level through different means and both are trying to teach us something to get to the next stage. But they both have their own issues in how the other teaches us. And so they are the spiritual concept of the Bodhisattva and this is why they’re a bit of a interesting you know relationship where DJ Otter is this more childlike mischievousness, playfulness… The Conductor is this more like intellectual form formulaic, you know, individual and character and personality trait. The Infinite is kind of, you know, here’s the level of I am seeing past the observer. The Infinite is basically… The Infinite is basically the representation of what consciousness is. One of the core things I’m trying to show in the game is you as the character, and this will be shown narratively… Part of the story is showing how all of these perspectives come from one single source which is kind of reality itself. The Infinite… the Infinite plays with that.

GC: Yeah.

Unwise: And so the end goal is you… all of these characters are actually the same person, and you the player are actually the same person as well.

GC: Ok, gotcha! So… I may be oversimplifying it a bit more but it’s almost like DJ Otter represents your street smarts as far as like… “Okay, I”ve gotten to this point, but I figured out how to kind of cheat this a little bit here, well I could do it this way…

Unwise: Gamed the system, yeah.

GC: But if I do it this way I can get to the same place just a little easier. Where the conductor is a little more by the book — let’s do step one, step two, step three, in order. Do not deviate. And then the Infinite is, I guess for lack of a better term… “Ya know, I’m just vibing here. I’m just seeing everything.”

Unwise: Yeah, the Infinite is mostly like I’m laughing and taking joy at the dramatic play in front of me. And yeah, that’s a good… And Street Smarts is a good way to put it. And the Conductor’s pissed because he’s like “I worked so hard for this! DJ Otter just comes in doing whatever he wants and gets to the same point? It makes no sense!”

GC: Well perfect, yeah so let’s talk about the like community side of things there too like I said I was looking at your devlogs for that and I did just see the where you can start pushing your factories up to the cloud so that way people can then download it and they can kind of listen to your music. I definitely need to go do that to see the expansive things that are coming from that. Have you ever thought of putting in like some type of multiplayer aspect to Future Vibe Check like kind of like a jam session type of mode or something like that?

Unwise: Yeah, that’s the dream. You know, I mean like right now is, you know, ability to share. Next is going to be MIDI support in and out so people can upload MIDI files and and export MIDI files of their factories. And that’ll come with a lot of cool stuff because then it’s all the, you know, the world of MIDI in at your fingertips in the game. Yeah, and then, you know, right now, mainly due to budget and and how we’re thinking about development…

GC: Sure.

Unwise: If we cross certain wish list thresholds by end of year, I will I’m going to I’d like to pull the trigger on let’s do multiplayer in creative mode. ‘Cause I think that, you know, the idea of go with your… get into a lobby with your friends and just make music together and goof off. It’s kind of cool. Yeah, and there’s something there that I’m really excited about. Architecturally, it it it would obviously anything multiplayer is super tough. And when you put something like audio in the mix, it’s even tougher. Yeah, but I I from how we built parts of the game, totally doable. It just will take time and effort and work and and and I’m hopeful that the game will, you know, find its audience and and and get some folks to make some cool music on it and share it. If that goes well, then it’s like, okay, let’s go do multiplayer and creative mode show, which should be super exciting, but it’s not planned yet.

GC: Okay, gotcha. Because yeah, like thinking about that exactly like we just said there, like you’re optimizing putting in MIDI files so you can either upload them into Future Vibe Check and then be able to use them or even download them out from Future Vibe Check. It almost seems like this goes from being a automation game about music to then probably what is kind of your point is now also a music creation tool that you can then link up with any of the other things outside and like create music from a game and then like modify that outside something with a little more in-depth like very specific just music tools or anything like that. And that is a… like I I like my brain just opened up of like “Oh the possibilities!”

Unwise: 100%. And that’s that’s goes back to like that third pillar of the musical notation system is you know there’s other cool things I’ve done in the game where obviously the grid represents rhythm. The colors of the notes represents pitch but then like the speed of the wind represents tempo. There’s a dayight cycle that’s tied to progression. There’s other you know weird things I’m doing there to like translate music theory to visual. And I haven’t even started really marketing or showing the game off in kind of where music producers and folks live.

GC: Yeah.

Unwise: Yeah. That’s one of the big goals is getting folks from the music creation community to get in and and see what they can make in creative mode. Mostly because also, you know, most people are used to making music on here’s a track that goes from A to B. And what’s powerful about Future Vibe Check is it’s node-based composition which is completely new way to make music. You can do like probabilities of rhythms and send things to a signal emitter. So that opens up composition possibilities by a lot. And other people have done node-based music, but I have yet to see someone do node-based music with procedural systems. And so I think that’s a first and I think opens up a lot of doors for music production.

GC: Gotcha. Yeah. And kind of going off of… some of the rest of the conversation as well, like where do you think Future Vibe Check fits in the automation game space? Like so I you think of InfiniFactory or like Space Chem or something kind of more the puzzly element versus a Factorio which is definitely more heavy on the automation side. It sounds like you like you’re kind of somewhere in the middle so to speak?

Unwise: I’d say that. Yeah, I’d say so. I I say we’re somewhere in the middle. I think the the goals are here’s a more accessible automation (game). And that means everything from controller support to, you know, ease of systems. Here’s a more immediate visceral automation game where you hear what you build. Mhm. And here’s an automation game with new puzzles to solve because of the spatial reasoning with node-based music, not just conveyor belts. And I feel like those are the three ways we’re differentiating. I think there are other ways like the narrative and the aesthetics. I feel like a lot of automation games sometimes feel to me like it’s it’s always like the sci-fi base or like the kind of the the planet in the desert and I wanted to find something that’s like super colorful like maybe almost too colorful. And and like I think that’s a differentiator is like here’s a super weird narrative with weird characters and a weird art style in this genre which is usually not that you know. So yeah.

GC: Gotcha. So, to the person who either doesn’t know a lot about, automation games or initially kind of bounce off of animation games, like say they look at Factorio or something like that or Dyson Sphere and they’re just like, “Oh, no, absolutely not.” Pitch them this game and why it would be better for the casuals. Or let me rephrase that, why it would be better for casual observers or people new to the genre and why you think this would be a good fit for them to give it a shot.

Unwise: Yeah, I I say automation games have something very unique about them where your actions and decisions lead to immediate improvement. And I think music has something very universal about it where your ability to create music is is divine and everyone enjoys that. I think the problem sometimes with automation games is it’s very hard to get to point B without a lot of time and effort. And you don’t see the fruits of your labor until very late in the game. In future vibe check, you see your fruits of your labor immediately. The second you create a music item, you hear what you make. And you don’t need to know any music theory to make something sound great. And so you can experience the beauty of music while also experiencing the beauty of solving some of the math and logistics in automation games in an environment that does not ask a tremendous amount of time or a tremendous amount of optimization to get there. So that’s kind of that would be my my pitch to the casual player.

GC: Gotcha. Okay. And that especially talking with you now like that I’m definitely looking more into it and I’m going to have to keep an eye on it and make sure to give it a look on full release and see what see what all I can start doing.

Unwise: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

GC: So, any other things that you would like to let people know about before like your full release comes out? I know right now your Steam page says that it’s coming soon. Demo is still available. So, everyone go download and give it a shot. But any other special things we should be looking out for other than what you’ve already told us?

Unwise: Yeah. Yeah. No, what I want to share with others is, you know, go check out the game and and make your own vibe and share it with the community. We have a new demo out and another up out soon and then a large update in about 2 months with MIDI support. And we hope for a release sometime March of next year if all goes well with the next few months of development. So that’s kind of timeline for release. But there’s also already a ton of cool music you can make in the game right now. And please join the Discord. We take feedback super seriously and it’s an awesome community that we’re building. So, we’d love to see you there.

GC: Perfect. Sounds great. I’ll definitely have to go ahead and hop in there myself. Manik, thank you so much for taking some time to talk with me here about your game. I’m really excited, looking forward to it. For everyone else who’s taking some time to watch this, thank you so much for joining us here. As we said, definitely give the demo a look. It is currently out on Steam, definitely some big updates coming here soon. And keep an eye on the GameCritics.com channel here for more trailers, more reviews, and more future interviews coming up here soon. Again, Manik, thank you so much.

Unwise: Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

The post VIDEO INTERVIEW: Unwise on Future Vibe Check appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

Eugene Sax sits down with Owl Machine to chat about their upcoming pacifist bullet-hell title, Key Fairy.

TRANSCRIPT:
GameCritics.com: Hello everyone. Thank you so much for joining me once again. This is Eugene Sax for GameCritics.com. Today we have something a little different. I initially was looking through a lot of the Summer Game Fest stuff, and one in particular kind of caught my eye when it was initially announced here. This was on the Frosty Game Showcase. And by all means correct me if I’m wrong. I’m pretty sure that’s where you guys were first coming up here. But it was initially with a streamercalled NoHandsNZ and they had praised this game and the developers as far as their accessibility items and their kind of openness for how they were addressing accessibility for this game. So, I wanted to go ahead and give it a look and this really quickly became a game that I am really excited about here as well. So reached out to them and they were both more than happy to sit down here with me a little bit to talk about their game Key Fairy. Tex, Tex Barnes and Niosis, thank you so much for joining me today!

Tex Barnes: Thanks for having us.

Niosis: Yeah, thank you so much for having us.

GC: Yeah, of course. So let’s go ahead and do the kind of easy easy questions here right off the top. We’ll go ahead either one of you who would like to start, can you go ahead and just give me a quick history from you both here? What is your background in games? What got you into gaming as a hobby? And kind of what are your roles here for Key Fairy?

Tex:Yeah. Do you want to start with that, Niosis?

Niosis: Yeah, sure. So I guess my history is that I got into like independent game development pretty early on. I’ve been actually into this since like high school. So like yeah, I got really enchanted with all the beautiful art that was coming out of the independent scene and like all of the kind of stranger approaches to game development. And ended up pursuing it from there. Yeah.

Tex: Yeah. I I didn’t make games until like five years ago and then I got really into the like micro rapid development game jam space.

GC: Mhm.

Tex: And then I really wanted to make tiny little focused experiences and then worked back backwards into making larger things.

Niosis: Yeah, we both kind of just like ended up turning going from like little small things to like slowly spiraling out to this.

GC: Very cool. Very cool. So if memory serves here from kind of what I’m seeing here on the game, Tex, you’re kind of the I guess kind of head for programming and then Niosis, you are kind of more of the art side of this game for Keyfairy. Is that correct?

Niosis: Yeah, that’s right.

GC: Right. Perfect. Excellent.

Tex: But with a studio of this size, we sort of just wiggle around in different roles.

Niosis: Yeah. Yeah, I mean like yeah, Tex does a whole bunch of the like you know graphics programming stuff and I do every now and then like do a bit of graph programming and other things. Yeah. So it kind of mixes and matches.

GC: Yeah. With a team of two that makes sense. You got to both of you got to wear a lot of hats, right?

Niosis: Yeah.

GC: Sounds good. Well, talk to me about Key Fairy, like what was the initial inspiration for it?

Niosis: Yeah. Oh, I was going to say like I feel like a lot of it came out of specifically the idea of trying to make a game that explores like the theme of non-violence and how you make a game that is like energetic and fun to play in a kind of action oriented way but that isn’t just about like reskinning violence. And like trying to, yeah, communicate pacifism through the response that your character has to violence itself.

GC: Mhm. Okay.

Tex: Yeah. It’s from taking stuff away, right? Like is bullet hells are a very action heavy genre and all about like shooting things. But if you actually play a shoot them up or a bullet hell, you just sort of hold down the attack button and then dodge. And so you can just entirely refocus the game around evasion and then you get all of this different story stuff that can come out of it because you’re now playing this character who’s constantly defensive and never really attacks.

Niosis: Yeah, there are plenty of bullet hells where like shooting is so default that you don’t even need to press a button for it. So if you’re not pressing a button for it, you can just skip it entirely. It was a little bit of it. Yeah.

GC: Gotcha. That kind of went into my immediate next question there as well. So, it sounds as far as like ’cause exactly like you said, bullet hells, I always think of it as, you know, lots of bullets on screen, you’re shooting at everything all the time. And it sounds like, and definitely correct me if I’m wrong, but kind of the idea as far as making it that pacifist style was kind of I guess trying to break that norm of bullet hells, like specifically making it with a pacifist focused. Is that right?

Tex: Yeah. Yeah, it’s I mean I think good games ask questions about genre and about like design and I think ultimately one of the big questions we’re asking is like do you need to be a character who’s constantly attacking? Does that actually add to the experience? And I think that’s what we’re sort of exploring in the in the game. But there is still a lot of like attacks on screen at points. It’s just not your attacks.

GC: Mhm. Yeah. There was a part in the demo where you’re facing a couple of I guess we’ll call them ranged characters ’cause I’m not sure their exact name, but like the witches that kind of shoot out little bullets at you and then one of the one of the giant cubes that just throws itself around in the arena. And that one I got stuck on that for quite a bit of time.

Tex: Yeah, it gets pretty hard. I mean like so a lot of pacifist games, a lot of non-violent games are really really cozy. It’s like you’ll play the Sims or something and it’s like you’re just chilling and that’s great and I like that experience, but I really like really fast play paced frenetic games and I struggle to get that experience without a character who’s just going through the world stabbing everything with their big sword.

GC: Speaking of the big sword, the one that you specifically call out, no, you don’t attack with it, it is a sword.

Niosis: Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we were trying to come up with ideas for the game and early on we were like, “Oh, you know, be hilarious, right? Is you get a sword and then the sword it’s just for dashing.” Like, it’s just like, you know, you become a Dark Souls protagonist, but only the dodge roll part.

GC: It’s so good. I love it. And and it is such a unique way, too, cuz it is this like especially compared to like your main character, it feels like a massive sword and it’s only half a sword cuz it’s broken when you initially get it, right? And the entire point is like, hey, no, this is this is a sword. It gives you the option to move around more, but you don’t attack with it. You specifically do not attack with it.

Tex: Yeah. The whole focus is on movement. Like that’s the the the name of the game is just how can you move in more complicated and interesting ways? Because if you’re taking away the ability to attack, you need to replace it with something because otherwise it just feels like it’s less game. And I think we’ve replaced it with a more complicated movement system where you got a really floaty character and then you’ve got a grappling hook and then you’ve got a dash ability on top of that and it just becomes exponentially a really high skill ceiling for…

GC: Right. Yeah, 100% agreed. Like I know when I was starting it, I was kind of just using the grapple hook and hooking onto the environment as far as like any of the walls and just trying doing like the straight line kind of around, but definitely in some of the like the trailers and that that are on your guys’ Steam page easily like Yeah. hook onto the enemy and just swing around them. You can you can do that. Nothing stopping you except for you know your skill.

Tex: Yeah. I mean that’s why they drop stars. Initially, initially the idea was like maybe you just wait them out and then they calm down. But having them drop stars forces you to get really close to them. And so now you’re constantly trying to not get hit whilst getting as close as physically possible to the monsters so you can collect the stars that they drop before they despawn. Which weirdly makes it like in a lot of ways it makes it play harder than a traditional bullet hell where you’re constantly trying to like back away from everything and get into your little safe space.

GC: Mhm.

Tex: Yeah.

GC: Very nice. Perfect. So let I want to go into the art a little bit there as well because I first off love the art. I love the very like black and whitevery stark colors and then how when you get into combat it does kind of encroach in a little bit. What what was some of the inspiration from you Niosis as far as the art from this game and the world design?

Niosis: Yeah, well the art like I think the big inspirations come from like old tabletop role playing game art. Like if you look at original D&D, it’s all like Zines basically. Mhm. With this really stark kind of sketchy ink style as well as like you know old medieval woodblock paintings and fairy tale books and things like that. But also a little bit because like growing up I’ve been doing a lot of art and it’s all just been like ink traditional traditional ink art. And so when we were starting this game and we had two people we had to make this decision between like art that we could both make or just going really heavily on like a really stylized look. So I ended up becoming the dedicated artist. And yeah, it’s all just like things from my sketchbook that I find and then scan in. Was like the first chunk of the art was like literally just flicking through old sketchbooks and taking photos and editing it all up.

GC: Gotcha. Very cool. Because I know like from the and from the like Steam page and all that like everything is like all about like kind of a folklore and everything like that. Were you drawing inspiration from any type of folklore in particular or just kind of a mismatch or?

Niosis: Yeah, I mean not yet. But it’s basically Yeah, basically just been like the general storytelling style that that Folktale has. As well as like you know there’s a lot of things that that cut very close to real life fairy tales but we’ve also been trying to avoid like overt references as much as possible. Sure. And so like you know there was this moment where I really wanted Sleeping Beauty but then we ended up like reorientating you know so we’re trying to keep it agnostic in a way that feels a bit like timeless but also more rooted in like as well as like yeah rooted in like gothic fantasy and that kind of look of it.

GC: Okay, understood. And yeah, I think the the black and white kind of from starting is definitely a good way to invoke kind of the Gothic style as well, just ’cause that’s, you know, I mean, that is kind of traditional as far as the like color palette, I guess. But definitely like I’m thinking right near the end of your demo with facing off against some of the like the princesses and that definitely I can see how that kind of invokes like the kind of fairy tale aspect to it.

Niosis: Yeah. Yeah. I mean like fairy tales are all like this kind of interesting mix between spooky and whimsical, and I think you know like Tex brings the whimsical and I bring the spooky and it ends up like hitting the right niche.

Tex: I think a lot of people when they’re like oh fairy tales are actually a lot weirder than you think. What they mean is that like they’re a lot darker. But if you actually read a lot of like spoken word folklore it’s just bizarre. It’s so bizarrely written in in both that it’s darker and that just characters act in these strange ways and talk in these strange ways that isn’t really replicated in a lot of modern storytelling, and we’re trying to bring some of that energy.

GC: Gotcha. Yeah, that’s and that’s very cool. It definitely gives Key Fairy a very unique style and definitely its own like unique energy. I mean even just looking at the game, but yeah, actually sitting down and playing with it, I can definitely see that and that’s one of the things that stuck out to me with getting into it and why I really wanted to have this conversation. So, I think you knocked it out of the park with that.

Niosis:Thank you.

GC: But yeah, so I guess the let’s get into the little more of the meat and potatoes as far as kind of the reason why I wanted to have this conversation in the first place. So like I said at the top GameCritics.com we go out of our way to specifically like highlight any of the accessibility functions whether it is like for deaf and hard of hearing as far as like captions are concerned for any type of remappable controls or anything like that and with such a presence there as far as your openness to that accessibility I guess journey going through this game. Like I was reading a lot of your blog posts Tex about the accessibility function you wanted to add it in. But tell me a little more about it. Like what went into the planning for all of these accessibility options and how did you prioritize different ones over the other?

Tex: Yeah, so I think accessibility seems like a big scary thing if you’re developing especially because it’s something that’s not really taught at university or whatever. But it’s not that tricky. There’s the big place is GA game accessibility guidelines. There’s a there’s a website where a bunch of researchers have gathered a a big long list of all of the major things that you should be looking out for. There’s other stuff that’s not on the list and it’s worth asking around and play testing a lot, but those are the big things to keep an eye out on and categorize them based on the level of impact and difficulty to implement. So, a lot of the really hard things to implement also only impact an extremely small percentage of the population. But that doesn’t mean they’re not worth doing. It’s just a thing to think about. You’re… we’re trying to think about what’s going to have the biggest impact for our audience, but also what’s core to the experience that we’re making and what elements are outside of that core experience, but could be a sticking point for some players. That’s a big thing to keep track of. Like if if this game isn’t a puzzle game, if there was a puzzle that some players were getting stuck on, they should be able to skip it because that’s not core to the experience and they shouldn’t be hampered from the main experience by this like random off side thing or like a fishing minigame shouldn’t be preventing you from progression or whatever.

GC: Yeah.

Tex: So in the initial planning phase when we were designing the game, we thought about what the games weaknesses would be in terms of accessibility and what its strengths would be. Because there’s a lot of things that the actual design of it works in its favor. It’s pretty good for color blindness that the game’s all black and white. It’s pretty good for people who are hard of hearing that all of the writing is just written on the screen. But then we added a bunch of random effects to the text. So, we also need to provide the options to simplify the font. And it’s just it’s just making a lot of lists, to be honest. It’s something you should be able to have an eye for if you’ve spent enough time developing games, understanding what’s going to be easy and what’s going to be hard for you, yeah. But then you just compile a list and figure out what’s easy and what’s going to have the most impact.

Niosis: Yeah. I mean one thing like you’re talking about like prioritization a little part of it is yeah just having it in front of people and then every now and then someone will come to us and say like ah you know I want to be into this game but this thing is having I’m having trouble with this thing so like you know the the trees kind of sparkle in the background and that sometimes that’s too noisy for some people and so you know as soon as someone brings that up then that’s a pretty simple fix, and so like a lot of the changes have been like preemptive, but a lot of them have also been reactive to what we’re seeing in front of us. And just being like open to the feedback that like, yeah, there can be simple things that are not core to the experience that are just some side visual thing that we put in there for fun that doesn’t need to be there always or doesn’t need to be there at all and we can work around it, things like that, you know.

GC: Okay, very cool. So I I’m assuming one of those was probably at least as far as the feedback was concerned, one of the big ones from your blog post was the camera and how it initially was sitting to follow the player, but now it’s been switched to in 99% of cases to where it’s just static for the room, right?

Tex: Yeah. So, it we we initially had it be all static in all the rooms and then we wanted to have larger rooms and it made sense to have the follow camera and we sort of got too lost in the sauce. I got too lost in the sauce. Niosis kept being like you don’t need a follow camera in this room. I really like the follow camera ’cause it makes you super It makes it spooky. It gives it a horror game vibe in some of the rooms where you’ll enter a room and then a monster will just appear. But that experience isn’t actually core to the game. And so it’s pretty reasonable to add in an option at least that for almost all of the rooms, especially any room in which you have to do an engagement where a monster’s going to attack you, you should be able to lock that camera. Because it just gave people it gave some people motion sickness. Small percentage of people. And there’s no reason to prevent them from playing the game for their experience.

GC: Yeah. Especially with having the grapple hook and having movement be such a core thing, I can imagine that with a moving camera, you’re moving really fast if you’re like doing chain grapples and all that. Yeah, I could see how that could trigger some motion sickness for people.

Tex: There’s still some long tunnels where at this point it makes sense to keep the follow camera, but those are places where you’re just moving in a straight line and there’s nothing attacking you. And so I feel like that’s probably okay. But I might make it that the camera moves more linearly rather than sort of sliding around.

GC: Okay, understood. Gotcha. So kind of piggybacking off of some of the like accessibility options there, what was the specific idea behind like some of the color palettes? I know you went into a little more in depth on it on the blog post, but I’m thinking like I’ve seen a lot of games where if they do different modes for color blind, like they’ll specifically call out like, “Hey, here is this very specific type of color blindness versus this one versus this one,” ’cause I know there’s a couple of different versions of it, right? Most of the color palette options that you all have starts out black and white, which is probably pretty safe to kind of cover most, vision impairments or anything like that, but then they don’t necessarily have the specific like I guess quote scientific name for the color blind.

Tex: The color palettes aren’t really for color blindness ’cause as far as I’m aware, and we’ve play tested a fair amount, color blindness doesn’t impact your experience of the game. The the big issue with color blindness, this is actually a general design thing, if you’re making a game that isn’t black and white. The big issue with color blindness is if the only thing distinguishing two states or two objects is color. And so what you generally want to do isn’t just provide an option that swaps the colors. It’s put symbols on things, provide audio cues, provide a bunch of additional stuff that makes it clear that these are two separate objects. And so even if they look gray to a player or if they both look the same color to a player, they’ll be like, “Oh, this one’s got a triangle on it and this one’s got a square on it, so these are different.”

Niosis: Yeah, there’s a lot of different parts. Like we’re finding that there’s a lot of different information that you can communicate that isn’t just color, like shape and value and noise versus the opposite of noise, I guess. And then we’re having to like you work around, you know, we’re having to do that anyway. And so that’s becomes just like part of the development is making it visually clear regardless of the colors of it.

Tex: Yeah. The value of the pallets from an accessibility point though is eye strain actually. If you it’s easy to to get worn out essentially from just this really high contrast. And so we the the base pallets that we’ve provided reduce the contrast really heavily. So you can have it be like more gray or more like blues. But then it’s also just like a nice gameplay thing that you can unlock more pallets as you go along. And it makes it easier for me to play to be honest being able to change the palette every now and again ’cause I do get a little I’m going a little bit crazy.

Niosis: Yeah, an entire year worth of only black and white.

GC: Well, especially with how often you’re all looking at it day in day out doing the development for it, too. Like I I can imagine the eye train would be would be pretty intense.

Tex: Yeah. Whenever I look at a game that has like color, it blows my my mind.

GC: Well, very cool. Was there any other big I guess accessibility thing that either made it harder to develop the rest of it for or anything in particular that like oh I like the thing that comes to mind was when you were talking a little more about some of the stuff that you were borrowing from Celeste for instance and the like speed option that you implemented I know initially it’s for you know accessibility is like Hey, people, especially with a game being this fast, they may want to slow it down a little bit so that way they can more easily process and be able to follow along a little more, but then you even made the comment on your blog post as far as like, well, this is actually good for speedrunners as well. They could just boot it up to the max and they can just zip through anything. Was there any other similar stories like that when you’re programming in the accessibility stuff?

Tex: A little bit. So like the Celeste has become the sort of cornerstone for good accessibility design because they make they do a bunch of really smart things. Especially putting a warning before the assist mode being like this is our intentions as designers. These options specifically could break the flow of the game if you don’t need them. But if you do need them, they’re here. And so I think that’s really good. And we have had friends who are like, I had to stop playing the game initially, but now I can continue playing it because I could tweak it ever so slightly so it would just be just be manageable. So that’s great. But the other thing that I think weirdly changed the experience for some people was the the one-handed options. We provided some options so that you can play it with just a mouse or just a keyboard or just like one joystick essentially. So it’ll all be using the buttons on that side, which is really useful if somebody only has one hand that they can use to play it, but also it sort of makes the game a little bit… On mouse and keyboard, the mouse has a lot more fluidity of movement because it can go in any direction whereas the keyboard is pretty four directional. And so it sort of feels more fluid to play just with the mouse for some people, even if they don’t need to, which I thought was funny.

Niosis: Yeah. I mean, that’s the thing about like all accessibility settings is that, I think a lot of people miss the fact that, like disabilities aren’t something that exist outside of the context of the society that you live in. Like they exist within the world that you’re you’re in. and the the accessibility that exists within that. And as a result of that, accessibility settings and assistance can be useful to anyone like they don’t you don’t need like a special card to find them helpful to find them like enriching and fulfilling. Yeah, yeah. So I think we found that like it’s just useful to everyone this kind of stuff in different ways and for different people.

GC: Yeah. At the end of the day, it’s about just getting your game to as many people who are interested in it and don’t have any type of blockers that would stop them from enjoying the experience, right?

Niosis: Yeah. And like it’s just the case that like you know, every single person has their own needs and that like being able to tweak to those needs regardless of who you are is really valuable.

Tex: Yeah, that’s the big thing is is providing a bunch of sliders and toggles and and options so that it can be tailored to the person because everybody’s different.

GC: Yeah. Very cool. So, one of the last couple ones I have here. So, I know right now Key Fairy is still being developed. The demo is still available. So, everyone like go download it right now and go play it. It’s great. But what else do like what else do players have to look forward to as the game is being developed? Like is there going to be like a demo 2.0 or anything like that or…?

Niosis: We’re currently debating on the 2.0 like we are looking forward to NextFest coming up which will be our next big thing as we get nearer and nearer to a release date announcement. Yeah. So, that’s coming sometime eventually in the future.

Tex: Thich it is the thing that every demo takes time to make that you could otherwise be spending making the full game. And we’re getting quite close to the full game.

GC: Oo, that’s exciting!

Tex: We’ll have to see, keep your eyes peeled.

GC: Excellent. I love a little bit of mystery. Well, perfect. Last thing I have for you all. So with de with all your demo work and all of your game developing, everything, I’m assuming you’ve probably take some time to kind of relax and take a break. Are there any games in particular that you are all enjoying currently? And what stands out to them as far as being kind of your go-to, go-to game?

Tex: What have you been playing, Niosis?

Niosis: Well, I just recently finished all that is currently out for Abiotic Factor, which is a New Zealand game. It’s a lot of fun. It’s like I have never played Half Life, but apparently it’s like Half Life. But like if it was kind of immersive sim cross survival sandbox. And it’s a lot of fun. Good old crunchy gameplay.

GC: Excellent.

Tex: I’ve been playing 100,000 demos from Steam NextFest and the Summer Games Festival. There was so many demos from all of our cool, smart friends.

GC: Boy, ain’t that the truth.

Tex: And they’re very good.

GC: Yeah, very cool. Yeah, I know. Anytime the Steam NextFest comes up, I try to spend a little bit of time and do like try to do some demo recording as well and try to like play a whole bunch of demos and throw it out onto YouTube and tell people like, “Hey, go play these games. They look really good.” Key Fairy is no exception.

Niosis: That’s really nice to hear. Yeah, cuz there’s so much beautiful stuff out there, isn’t there?

Tex: There is.

GC: So much, and not nearly enough time to play and highlight them all. Well, perfect. Anything else either of you two would like to share with our lovely audience before I let you both go?

Niosis: Well, yes, there is actually. So there is this beautiful game that has been receiving absolutely no attention because Tex never mentions it, but Tex just released a game called Pogo Pogo and it’s very cute. And like…

Tex: I cold released a game right after we did the summer games festival with Key Fairy.

Niosis: If you’re looking for a second black and white game to play.

Tex: A much smaller worse game, that’s an option. Also, I’m going to shout out a game so it’s not all on me. I think people should play the demo for Building Relationships because I think it’s amazing. The game where you’re a house going on a date.

GC: Oh, I remember that one. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Tex: It’s really good.

GC: Well, perfect. So again, Niosis, Tex, thank you both so much for taking some time and talking about your game here. I am very look very much looking forward to full release. I’ve been kind of chomping at the bit waiting for some more. I’ve been hanging out in the Discord kind of waiting to see all the news or anything like that from it. So, I’m excited for a possible release date here coming up soon.

Tex: Ooh. Keep your eyes peeled and your ears peeled.

GC: Will do. And for everyone else as well, I will also go ahead and link some of the I’ll link the two blog post that I had mentioned before that Tex had wrote up as far as the accessibility journey and kind of going into more of a deep dive for that as well. A lot of good stuff on there. And again being so open about it like I think it is refreshing kind of seeing that seeing that openness through it as far as like what did that look like going from start to finish ’cause that’s not something that everyone takes the time to do. I think he even mentioned that in the blog post as well. It’s like some people only do it as far as like hey is it worth doing right as far as like a monetary standpoint but it’s not always the point. All righty. Well, we’ll go ahead and call it there. Thank you all so much for joining us here and definitely keep an eye out for any more future interviews, game trailers, and any more game reviews that we’ll have here on GameCritics.com. Tex, Niosis, again, thank you so much for joining me.

Niosis: Thank you so much for having us.

GC: All righty.

The post VIDEO INTERVIEW: Owl Machine On Key Fairy appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

Fighting games were never my specialty. My childhood best friend would always beat me at Soulcalibur II, no matter which character I picked – Astaroth’s axe could only take me so far, and Raphael could never save me from defeat. However, despite my struggles, I still came back to it… and many others like it.

While the competitive side of me wanted to improve at Soulcalibur, another part of me genuinely enjoyed the storytelling.

Fighters might not seem like they have substance beyond the mechanical aspects needed for mastery, but many of these titles offer so much more than just that. In addition to wild combos and flashy finishers, devs frequently give us character arcs and varying perspectives, which I find fascinating.

Soulcalibur was the first fighting game that won me over at a young age. From the first installment in 1998 to Soulcalibur VI in 2018, the plot has been compelling for over two decades.

The first Soulcalibur revolves around Soul Edge, a cursed sword that taints its owner and offers unlimited power. The weapon has corrupted a knight named Siegfried, who has turned into a bloodlusting monster named Nightmare due to its influence. While he’s already succumbed, Siegfried is determined to redeem himself and break free from its control.

The supporting cast have their own agendas. Heroes in Soul Edge want to destroy Nightmare and the sword, whereas others want to steal the sword’s power and claim glory for themselves.

Ultimately, the only way to stop Soul Edge is to wield Soulcalibur, an opposing holy sword. Along the way and through various sequels, we meet characters like Ivy Valentine and Xianghua, who fight to destroy the evil weapon and protect others from it.

The younger me enjoyed this plot, but focused more on the fighting aspect. However, the older and wiser version of me appreciates each game’s lore and how it all interconnects. With a wide cast typical of most fighting titles, players get different perspectives and viewpoints, enriching the experience.

In a way, I also felt like I grew up with the franchise. For example, Soulcalibur II was the first one I played when I was a kid, and it introduced me to Greek warrior Sophitia Alexandra. By the fifth game, we got to see her children, Patroklos and Pyrrha. While Soulcalibur V wasn’t a huge success, it provided nostalgia and plot continuity that kept me coming back.

While Soulcalibur was my first exposure, other titles made me appreciate the genre for more than just the battles. Tekken is one that has a special place in my heart.

I remember playing it on my dad’s PlayStation when I was too young to really know what I was doing, and I certainly didn’t grasp the more serious plot points. However, as I went through grade school, I connected the dots and realized how excellent its storytelling has been.

In this franchise we get plenty of drama worthy of a Shakespearean play with the Mishima and Kazama families. I remember my first time playing Tekken 2 and feeling shocked at seeing what Kazuya did to Heihachi — after defeating his father in the tournament, Kazuya threw Heihachi off a cliff, cementing a brutal cycle of betrayal and revenge within the Mishima family as one of the most important and frequently recurring plot points of the Tekken series.

Further, each sequel expands on core concepts like the Mishima Zaibatsu’s global influence and how they use it to host the King of the Iron Fist Tournament. This competition (and the premise of every Tekken installment) is that the event brings in fighters from around the world to win fame and money, but it’s also a vessel for the family’s power struggles and world domination plans. That’s a plotline I’d expect from an HBO show like “Succession.”

There are smaller stories in Tekken, though, to be sure. Take Anna Williams, who didn’t have much of a backstory in the first game. However, she quickly became an important figure when she thwarted her sister, Nina, from assassinating Heihachi in the Iron Fist Tournament.

Through the franchise, we’ve seen expansion on her grudge against Nina, her life as a bounty hunter and a rekindling of the siblings’ intense rivalry in Tekken 5. Fast forward to Tekken 8, and her DLC return as the game’s 37th character features an Anna that has evolved drastically from the one we were introduced to years earlier.

Anna and Nina have had a compelling rivalry for 30 years, and it hasn’t gotten old. I love seeing the clash of love-hate relationships in games, and while it might be relatable because of my own siblings… well, that’s beside the point.

While the two sisters captured my attention, there are plenty of stories for everyone to get caught up in through other franchises as well, not least of all, Mortal Kombat. For years, I associated it with spending a couple of quarters after eating Chuck E. Cheese pizza or throwing bowling balls in the gutter, but it doesn’t take long to see that the story is a central asset of the franchise now.

While the early titles were groundbreaking at the time thanks to digitized graphics and the controversial level of graphic violence, Mortal Kombat 9 is notable thanks to its improvements in the franchise’s storytelling abilities.

The title takes you back to the period of the first three MK games, and the writers seized the opportunity to reboot the narrative. From plot holes to retold stories, the production gave gamers the kind of storytelling richness the MK characters deserved in the original ‘90s titles.

For example, Mortal Kombat 9 provided more insight into martial arts fighter Liu Kang, who faced immense pressure to win the Mortal Kombat tournament and save Earth from invading forces from other dimensions. This would be crucial to the future of the series, as Liu Kang has quickly become the central focus of the new timeline.

We also got to see more details about individual character relationships, such as the rivalry between royal daughters Kitana and Mileena, or more insights into Scorpion, who’s hell-bent on revenge. Altogether, the reboot makes the concepts and content from the original games more cohesive and engaging through excellent storytelling.

Mortal Kombat 9 set the bar high, and the franchise has only improved since the 2011 release. Mortal Kombat 11 introduced Kronika, whose objective was to erase the existing timeline and bring more balance to the world. This gave us time travel and alternate versions of characters. Mortal Kombat 1 rebooted the series again, now in a new timeline entirely, with Liu Kang becoming the new godlike protector of Earth.

Thanks to the time and effort put into the script, playing Mortal Kombat today is much different than when I mashed buttons back in the arcade. Now I’m paying more attention to the plots and feeling more invested in the characters than ever. As a child, I never thought I’d be secretly rooting for Scorpion to get his revenge or that I’d feel so satisfied when Raiden finally accepts his role as a protector.

Despite “only” being fighting games, it’s easy to see the effort put into the Tekken, Mortal Kombat and Soulcalibur franchises. While some may only play these titles for their competitive or technical aspects, the plots have much to offer thanks to well-written and complex universes.

From power struggles to sibling rivalries, the creativity of the writing in fighting games keeps me coming back for more, despite being nowhere near the top when it comes to competing.

Now, with that said… let me call my friend to see if he’s up for a Soulcalibur II rematch. He doesn’t know I’ve been practicing for over 20 years!

— Jack Shaw

The post Why I Play Fighters (Despite Being Bad At Them!) appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

Video game soundtracks take on lives of their own — The opening beats of Morrowind’s main theme, the shifting chords of C418’s Minecraft, and the panic-inducing pizza delivery theme from Spider-Man 2 have stayed with gamers since they came out and will continue to for years to come.

Video game composing has become as respectable and mainstream a profession for musicians as any other genre: The band Sea Power made the soundtrack to the hit 2019 game Disco Elysium, the music collaborative Machine Girl composed the original soundtrack for the 2022 game Neon White, and even Paul McCartney helped work on Destiny soundtrack in 2014. Becoming a composer for a popular or hit video game can easily become a highway to stardom for musicians like Lena Raine, Koji Kondo, and Austin Wintory.

However, there is an entire subgenre of video game soundtracks deserving particular acclaim — Videogame mod soundtracks.

As videogame mods have become larger and more mainstream and accessible, so too have their makers become more ambitious, often incorporating fully-fledged soundtracks into their creations. These soundtracks are written by indie albeit highly skilled musicians, adding new life to mods, as well as occasionally opening up new opportunities for their composers. Mod soundtracks easily have the power to reshape the video game music world as it’s known, as seen in mods for Deus Ex, The Elder Scrolls and the Portal series.

Deus Ex Revision

One of the most impressive examples is Deus Ex Revision, a community-made overhaul mod of the groundbreaking 2000 immersive sim, Deus Ex. Available for free on the Steam store, it provides a total revamp of the base game, adding new areas, achievements, characters–and a totally revamped soundtrack. The composing duo EdenShard, consisting of John French and Logan Felber, did the soundtrack to Revision.

Composing a soundtrack is a difficult enough task, but even more so when working with a game that has a preexisting soundtrack. For Felber, who was writing a remixed soundtrack for Deus Ex Revision, this led to an interesting challenge, saying, “For the most part I refrained from ripping the original [Deus Ex soundtrack] samples as an exercise in the sound design…It’s a little tedious but plotting notes by hand gives me cleaner results as well as a more thorough handle on the composition.” This led to a soundtrack which, Felber says, had a “moodier, more ambient tilt at the cost of the characteristic ‘tracker sound’ edge…” Felber admits that “…While we took that as a matter of artistic license at the time, I think in retrospect it was more the limits of what we knew how to do musically. In some places it worked, but if I had to do it over again it would sound a lot different.” Felber’s soundtrack has been hailed since Revision was released, with many citing it as instrumental in retaining the atmosphere of the original game.

The Elder Scrolls

Immersive sims are not the only genres to have mod soundtracks. Two of the largest mods for the renowned RPG series The Elder Scrolls, namely Beyond Skyrim and Tamriel Rebuilt, have similar initiatives. Beyond Skyrim is a sprawling fourteen-year-old project by modders to add the rest of the continent of Tamriel to Skyrim, and has had numerous composers work on its myriad subprojects, such as Daniel Ran, who wrote the soundtrack to the mod’s Bruma release; Michiel de Groot, who wrote the soundtrack for the mod’s upcoming Elsweyr release; and Eric Gordon Berg, who wrote the soundtrack for the mod’s upcoming The New North release. Tamriel Rebuilt is Beyond Skyrim’s older (and even more ambitious) counterpart for The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, and it too has had various soundtrack releases, some by Erik Rettig, known by his pseudonym ASKII.

For Beyond Skyrim, each composer had a differing thought process. Daniel Ran admits it was daunting work, saying, “When I’m working on something else, it will for the most part stand on its own, but the Bruma OST was implicitly put up against some of the best work by one of the most successful video game composers to date. That was a mental challenge I often struggled with.” Like Felber, however, he tried to stay true to the original music of Oblivion, where Bruma first appeared, while also developing something novel: “It’s not so much about the specific choices Jeremy Soule made, like chord progressions or instrumentation, but rather how each was used to create the desired effect as a whole. People have specific expectations for a TES score; memorable, song-like tracks with harmony and structure that are easy to follow. So I applied my own style to those principles.”

Ran worked on a section of the world of The Elder Scrolls seen in a previous title; whereas Michiel de Groot had no such restrictions working on an Elsweyr project. He found writing the soundtrack to be a challenge, but a fun one. Speaking of the differences between snowy Skyrim and balmy Elsweyr, he says, “We needed something more distant, something vastly different, in order to really make it fit this beautifully unique place…In the case of the music for Beyond Skyrim Elsweyr, it ended up as a wonderfully diverse collection of instruments from all over the world, due to the visual input and history of the region.” De Groot cited extensive research he did on both the fictional world of Elsweyr’s lore as well as the cultures that inspired it as being key in helping create his soundtrack. Having that to guide him prevented him from falling into what he called the “Infinite freedom” trap and doing whatever he wanted whenever he wanted. “Yes, having no time / budget restraints can be dangerous for efficiency when you’re not careful–but it also paves the way for more creative freedom than a professional environment might provide,” he finished.

Eric Gordon Berg agreed that the process is a daunting one. Like Ran, Berg has worked on a soundtrack for a part of Tamriel previously seen in another game, this time Morrowind. “I have spent countless hours listening, studying, researching and trying to emulate the sound of these games. Not just Skyrim, but the entire franchise. There is something so special and unique about these soundtracks. They aren’t just fantasy soundtracks. They have an identity of their own.” He is hopeful of the finished product: “ I want people to listen to The New North fifteen years from now and feel that same level of nostalgia they have for the original Morrowind.” He hopes that when people hear his music for Beyond Skyrim, they don’t think of him, but rather of The Elder Scrolls.

ASKII worked on the soundtrack for Tamriel Rebuilt.

ASKII says he does not that the task of writing for Tamriel Rebuilt lightly. “It’s not just about complementing an existing soundtrack, but also about honoring the nostalgia and emotional connection people have with the original music.” He similarly does research as de Groot does: “Before I begin writing, I spend time listening to the original soundtrack again to get into the right mindset. I also ask for screenshots and lore background from the new regions to understand the story and emotional tone I need to convey.” Still, ASKII lets his own style shine through, especially as he has access to new technology: “The original soundtrack from 2002 used sampled instruments that don’t quite compare to modern libraries. That’s the biggest shift in sound. Some purists aren’t too fond of that–which I totally understand.”

As for whether or not working on mod soundtracks provided future opportunities, the results are mixed. De Groot found his work with Beyond Skyrim to be quite enriching. Aside from working with instruments and sounds and cultures he was unfamiliar with, most of his active clients were once developers on Beyond Skyrim. De Groot has had the opportunity to work on many other soundtracks on a smaller scale, on top of meeting several talented artists who’ve since made album covers for him. Berg has similarly had success, calling the gravity his project credit has “Overwhelming.” Berg has been interviewed by the BBC on his work, met musicians like Chrissy Taylor and Vela Farguharson, and started a small YouTube channel. “While I can’t say that the project has specifically been attributed to one opportunity or another,” he says, it has certainly launched my music career.” ASKII’s music was introduced to a broader audience through his work on Tamriel Rebuilt. “It’s become a meaningful part of my portfolio, and I feel honored to contribute to something with such legacy,” he said.

Portal

Portal mods are taking a similar path. Popular mods such as Portal Stories: Mel and Portal Reloaded both have their own unique soundtracks. Jared Poolaw collaborated with Ella Ayar for the soundtrack to the mod Portal Revolution, which released in 2024 on Steam to overwhelmingly positive reviews and adds an entirely new storyline independent of the base game of Portal 2.

Composing for Portal mods is a similarly challenging task, according to Jared Poolaw. Poolaw says the initial process of composing for Portal Revolution was “Surreal.” The project was intimidating at times and he admits, “There were many times where I felt like I bit off more than I could chew,” yet he adds, “I’m sure I wasn’t the only one thinking that.” Like other composers, Poolaw “tried to make sure every test chamber’s music sounded meditative and reminiscent of the first Portal’s soundtrack while also trying to mix in bits from Portal 2 and Half-Life.” Poolaw says his work on Portal Revolution has yet to open up any other opportunities so far, but says he’s glad to have it in his portfolio.

The Future

Most of the composers are in consensus — even more mods will have soundtracks in the future. Ran said his soundtrack is not the first and won’t be the last: “The barrier to entry is low enough now that getting paid for the work isn’t necessary any more, and streaming platforms like Spotify have made it easier to earn money than ever before, despite its drawbacks.” De Groot and Poolaw both agree that mod soundtracks will become more prevalent going forward and that working on one is one of the best ways for aspiring composers to get experience and build up a portfolio. “I think these kinds of modding projects are quite special and I’m glad to see them highlighted, specifically from an audio and music perspective,” said de Groot.

— J. Barnes

The post Beyond Skyrim: Mod Soundtracks appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

Death Game Hotel, White Owls’ VR title that forces players to ante up their body parts before playing games of chance and skill, recently relaunched as a free-to-play title which allows anyone with a Meta Quest helmet to get in on the bloody multiplayer action.

Recently, Gamecritics had the chance to interview creator Swery65 about what changes have been made to the game, and what he has planned for the future, for both DGH and other projects, such as the upcoming horror-themed beat-’em-up Hotel Barcelona (co-designed with Suda51) and a possible new version of Deadly Premonition!

The interview was conducted through a translator, and has been edited for clarity.

*

GameCritics (GC) — How did you come to the decision to move Death Game Hotel to being Free to Play?

SWERY — When I originally created the concept for Death Game Hotel it was mainly for a social, multiplayer type of game. Ever since launch, we’ve had such an amazing community around the game — especially on Discord — and a lot of the members let us know that they want to spread the game around to their friends and people they know online, however it’s sometimes difficult to do that with a premium, or ‘not free’ game. So I thought by making the game more accessible to players around the world, and allowing them to experience the game and lore firsthand, it would be able to transform into a sustainable business model, allowing us to make the tweaks to keep the game healthy. The main goal is to make sure as many people as possible can access that game that we made, and that the community wants to share.

GC — Speaking of the community, what do you find most interesting about the fanbase that has built up around the game?

SWERY — Rather than just using social channels to promote the game, for the first time in White Owls’ history we created a dedicated Discord server so that players would have a place to gather. We have various channels where players can freely talk to each other and find games, ‘Ask SWERY’ and ‘suggestions’ channels where the devs can get immediate feedback from players. We also have ‘dev parties’, where players can challenge the developers in the various death games, which we also livestream. We’ve used Discord to keep up with the community and make sure that they’re being heard — which has allowed us to see what changes are most important to the fans — even if those tweaks are sometimes far more difficult than the players might realize to implement. Being able to create a feedback loop makes sure that players feel like they’re being heard, which is a big part of why we took the game free to play.

GC — While making the move to Free to Play, you also included a new single player mode, the Slot Machine — why add this, and was it difficult to balance?

SWERY — It was extremely difficult to maintain the balance between the single and multiplayer modes. The main reason we wanted to include a single player mode was because we understood how difficult it can be for people to organize multiplayer sessions, so we wanted to make sure that players could have something enjoyable and thrilling to do inside the game while waiting for their party to arrive. One of the most complicated aspects was figuring out how we were going to use the chips you can win playing death game. We didn’t want players to wind up with huge stacks of chips that they couldn’t spend on anything, so we thought the slot machine would be a great way to give players another way to use those chips in an entertaining way. Of course, you can also lose body parts while playing the slot machine, and even win them back. The important part was making single players feel like they were getting the same experience as in the multiplayer gambling games.

GC — Speaking of losing body parts, in the table games players can use them to cheat in a variety of ways. Can you also cheat at the slot machine?

SWERY — The slot machine is entirely RNG-based, so we thought it would be a little risky to add in cheating mechanics.

GC — Is there just one slot machine room, or will players be able to use the slot machine in a variety of the game’s environments?

SWERY — Right now there is only one dedicated slot room per lobby, but it’s possible in future DLC updates we could add additional characters and locations for the death slot machines.

GC — Is the ‘story mode DLC’ that players can buy for the free to play game the same content as the game’s original single player mode?

SWERY — Yes, the story mode is the same as the single player mode from the Premium version of the game. The only change we’ve made is to tweak the amount of nuggets you can win playing the single player mode so that it doesn’t affect the free-to-play experience too much.

GC — What additional items are you adding to the shop in this new release? I was particularly happy to see a ‘Killer Tomato’ in there.

SWERY — We are currently working on a variety of item designs, although we can’t reveal any specifics just yet. Stay tuned for for news about other SWERY-ish items we’ll be adding. As for the new items available in the free-to-play version, we’ve added new items like bladed weapons you can use to cut off your own limbs, and darts you can throw into other players’ faces to try and gouge out their eyes. There’s plenty of interesting things to do with pointy and bladed items in the game.

GC — You’ve announced that there are going to be seasonal events in Death Game Hotel. How many are you thinking about, and what will these events feature?

SWERY — For right now you can expect the same kind of seasonal events we had in the Premium version, including summer, winter and Halloween festivals. But I’m not satisfied with just continuing as-is, and right now I’m looking at ways to include more original events and focus on the lore of the game. That could include crazy items and decorations around the lobby, because we’re working to make sure that it feels different from last year’s events. We haven’t locked down any specific dates yet, but given the game’s theme, we might do a Day of the Dead celebration, and there’s also a Japanese celebration of ancestors every summer that we would like to focus on. If only there was a national torture day, that would be perfect. We’d like to find weird celebrations that fit the game’s themes.

GC — Are you planning on adding any more multiplayer games to the current lineup of Goblets of the Reaper and Death Poker?

SWERY — We have plans for additional games, but nothing to announce just yet. Right now we want people to focus on Death Poker, since it’s a game that a lot of people already understand the rules of. Stay tuned for news about more games to come.

GC — Do you have any news to share about expanding the world of the game, be that through manga or light novel adaptations?

SWERY — I do have an idea for a light novel in the world of Death Game Hotel, and right now I’m looking for a good partner to work alongside. The writers I worked with on The Good Life have had their careers take off, and are very busy with their own projects, so the biggest obstacle right now is finding a partner who I work well with. So yes, I do have plans in this area.

GC — Now, to move on to other subjects — do you have any news you can share about Hotel Barcelona?

SWERY — We are currently working the the publisher, Cult Games, to find the best release date for the game. We’re currently taking the game to various events and looking for ways to get their hands on it.

GC — So Hotel Barcelona is complete?

SWERY — Yes, the game is finished, we’re just going through the console submission proccess.

GC — Where would you rank Hotel Barcelona among your games?

SWERY — Well, that’s hard to answer, it’s like asking me which is my favorite child. I can say that I’m always most excited about the game I’m currently working on, and Hotel Barcelona is the focus of all of my attention.

GC — It was recently reported that you worked on a VR test for Deadly Premonition, can you tell us a little more about that?

SWERY — It was actually Deadly Premonition 2. The developers and I did a test to see how the game’s environment worked in VR, but sadly I don’t have the rights to keep working on it or share what we made with the public. So if fans want to see Deadly Premonition in VR, they’ll have to let the publisher know and draw attention to it.

GC — Now, a question for you — is there any media you’ve been enjoying recently?

SWERY – I watch a lot of movies, as you know, but something I’ve really been enjoying lately is On Call, a show about the LA Police and what they go through. It’s from Dick Wolf, who’s done a lot of shows about law enforcement, and whose work I really like.

GC — Is there anything else that you’re working on you’d like to give people a hint about?

SWERY — Actually, there are a few games that we’re working on, focusing right now on how to build the new mechanics we’ve envisioned. One example is a multiplayer horror game, where we’re trying to find a way to make people feel like they’re having an out-of-body experience.

GC — Thank you so much for your time — do you have any final thoughts about Death Game Hotel you’d like to share?

SWERY — The most important thing I want people to know about Death Game Hotel is that when you buy a piece of pizza in the game and ‘eat’ it, when you pull your hand away the cheese will stretch realistically.

*

Thanks again to SWERY for providing a look into Death Game Hotel and what else White Owls is working on Death Game Hotel is currently free to play on Meta Quest 2, 3, and Pro.

The post INTERVIEW: SWERY65 – Revisiting Death Game Hotel appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

Disclosure: This is an article written and released by Ubisoft, and sent to GameCritics via Ubisoft PR. While we don’t usually run PR releases, given its focus on accessibility and our lifelong dedication to same, we’re happy to share this information. The article can be seen in its original format here.

Rainbow Six Siege X is launching on June 10, kicking off a new evolution of the tactical first-person shooter with new content and major updates. To help players prepare, we’ve published details on the Siege X PC & console specs, and in this article, we’re diving deep into accessibility.

The Siege team has long had accessibility in their sights as a priority, as you’ll see in our interview with User Experience Director Sébastien François. He describes the team’s embrace of accessibility throughout the years, shares details on how they’ve been preparing for Siege X, and offers insights into their future. Read on to learn more.

What is the Siege team’s goal or guiding philosophy when it comes to accessibility?

Sébastien François: Siege is a tactical competitive shooter with a strong esports scene, which presents its own set of challenges compared to a single-player game, but we do not want to compromise on accessibility. We want as many players as possible to be able to engage with our unique gameplay elements with comfort, so they can enjoy the full extent of what the Siege experience has to offer. This is an integral part of our design process, and an important focus for our ongoing efforts to improve the game season after season.

What production processes has the team implemented to help facilitate these goals?

SF: We have a dedicated Siege Accessibility team that has led many different initiatives throughout the years, and continues to do so. We rely on them and our partners within Ubisoft to inform our decisions from the very beginning during the conception phase, aswewant to make sure that we’re not creating unnecessary barriers.

One of the best things I’ve observed over time is that every member of the Siege team is an advocate for accessibility. During production meetings, various team members naturally bring up the importance of considering different aspects related to accessibility. This creates a positive environment that fosters the development of better and more inclusive designs.

Rainbow Six Siege has been going for almost ten years. Have there been any major accessibility milestones or evolutions throughout its history?

SF: The first major milestone was the creation of the dedicated team I mentioned earlier. With proper resources and growing expertise, the team has delivered incredible improvements.

One such example is the option to customize the color of both teams, a feature that highlights the challenges a 10-year-old game can face. Implementing this required extensive restructuring and thoughtful design, as it impacts many aspects of the game, from the user interface to in-game lighting and textures. This system has been a key milestone in promoting accessibility and shaping our processes, from design conception to technical implementation.

Our newest permanent game mode, Dual Front, which allows Attackers and Defenders to be on the same team, greatly benefited from this foundation. And the system will continue to receive updates in Year 10.

Distinguishing visual information quickly is a necessity in Siege. Are there visual adaptations that players can implement to help them parse what they are seeing?

SF: We have worked to provide options that allow players to focus on the core elements of gameplay comfortably, such as reducing the intensity of bright flashes, and removing blur effects or camera shake.

It is crucial for players to distinguish their team’s gadgets from their opponents’, which is supported through team color customization. In addition to the color itself, the way it is displayed gives players cues about how the gadget can be interacted with; colored LEDs indicate electronic interactions, while colored textures signify a gadget’s mechanical nature.

With Siege X, we revisited the Outline System to ensure enemies can be spotted in our revamped maps, which are generally darker. This new implementation enhances both immersion and fairness during gunfights.

Speaking of Siege X, what were the accessibility priorities as the team approached this evolution of the game? What are some of the features players can expect to see added?

SF: A major focus for us has been supporting visual accessibility in Dual Front and the modernized maps, using team colors on gadgets and outlines; these have been expanded to work with the new Siege X features from day one. New audio options have been introduced, such as customizable tinnitus sound options and controls for dynamic range. Another great addition is the Communication Wheel, which players can use to share information non-verbally. The team also worked on several quality-of-life improvements.

While Siege X is an important milestone, this is an ongoing effort. Some features, such as input remapping, were delivered earlier to lay the foundation for Siege X, and more features will continue to roll out season after season!

Looking ahead to the coming years of Siege X, what are your plans for expanding or refining accessibility in the game?

SF: We monitor best practices and are always on the lookout for improvements. In Year 10, we will further refine color customization with a significant update that will conclude a long series of incremental improvements made over the past years.

Another major initiative is to continue expanding player control over how they interact with the game through their inputs, whether using a mouse and keyboard or a controller.

Providing visual support for sound will be one of our next major areas of investigation, and we’re very excited to take on this challenge.

ACCESSIBILITY FEATURE LIST

Visual

• Colorblind accessible by design wherever possible
• Customizable team colors
• Customizable optic color when aiming down sight
• Visual intensity configurable through various settings, including screen shake, motion blur and a dark mode for bright flashes
• Configurable amount of information to display in HUD
• Configurable text chat size
• Conversion of voice chat to text

Audio

• Separate volume sliders for master, in-game music, in-game sounds, menu music, menu sounds, and voiceovers
• Voiceover presets to control amount of information communicated through voiceovers
• Configurable dynamic range to help avoid auditory fatigue by lowering the loudest sounds
• Configurable tinnitus sound effect of explosions and stun grenades
• Conversion of text chat to voice

Controls

• Keyboard & mouse and controller remapping for gameplay controls
• Controller presets
• Advanced sensitivity settings for controller, including configurable dead zones, acceleration and more. Separate settings for aiming down sights.
• Hold or Toggle option for main gameplay interactions

— Chris Watters

The post Rainbow Six Siege X Accessibility Spotlight appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

In my continuing effort to watch every episode of cartoons that I loved as a kid, the next one on my agenda was G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero — specifically, the Sunbow Productions run starting with the first installment of the original limited series, all the way through the regular episodes and finishing with G.I. Joe: The Movie.

(The series continued in a different run produced by DIC Entertainment for 44 more episodes.)

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For those who aren’t familiar, G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero (shortened to ARAH in toy circles) was one of the most popular kids’ cartoons in the ’80s, running from 1983-1986 for a total of 95 episodes, beginning with a limited series, and then being greenlit for a full daily series. The premise is that G.I. Joe is an elite quick-response military team comprised of various specialists, all banding together to fight Cobra, a terrorist organization bent on world domination.

As a kid of the ’80s myself, my first exposure to the show was watching it whenever I caught it after coming home from school. However, as was the case with every TV show back then, you inevitably missed some episodes because you weren’t sitting in front of the TV at exactly the right time, or because one of your parents commandeered the set to watch something else — and if you did manage to catch the show, there was a good chance it would be a re-run, as it was common for episodes to be shown out of order, or simply repeated. So, thanks to modern streaming technology and being a grownup with my own TV set, it’s easier than it ever has been to watch the entire run of G.I. Joe in the correct order and on my own timeline — and that’s exactly what I did. It became a fun daily ritual for my wife and I to make coffee, grab a blanket for the couch and play an episode or two in the morning before we started our day.

I can’t lie, hearing the heroic theme song and seeing the blood-pumping intro sequence after so many years brought back all the feels, and it was great to see the action and adventure I remember from back in the day — Duke! Spirit! Snake Eyes and the rest of the heroic Joes! Cobra Commander, Major Bludd and legions of evil Cobra troops! Lasers! Cool vehicles! Explosions! Everything a kid in the ’80s could want!

…However, it wasn’t long before reality set in.

I’ve revisited a fair number of shows like this from the ’80s, and across the board I’m struck with the sense that we didn’t know how to structure TV shows back then. Kids’ programming rarely delivered quality storylines and well-written characters. If you’re as old as I am and saw G.I. Joe when it originally aired on TV like I did, it’s a good bet that you have positive feelings and nostalgia for it — I know I do! But during this watch of the complete series, it was hard to get past the untapped potential.

One of the most notable things is how thinly the characters are written. Only a few faces get enough airtime to stand out, primarily Shipwreck and Lady Jaye, but there were dozens of Joes altogether. Sadly, they seldom had any defining qualities beyond an accent and what their costume looked like.

I’m sure this can be attributed to a lack of production sense back then, but also to the show’s primary purpose of selling toys. Why spend several episodes on building up a character if they’re not on store shelves for kids to buy later? This approach also meant that it was common for your favorite character to suddenly disappear for no reason, only to be unceremoniously replaced with whoever the newest figure in stores was. Were you a fan of Dusty or Quick Kick? Too bad, they’re gone. Hope you like Blowtorch and Recondo, now available at retailers near you!

There was also a notable lack of continuity and no overarching story arcs once we got past the initial limited series — some elements persisted or were referred to in later episodes, but there was no narrative throughline like we have with many modern cartoons. Of course part of this is due to the fact that there was often no easy way for people to catch up on episodes they might have missed. As such, many programs (not just cartoons) leaned into stand-alone episodes for ease of viewing, but the ’80s were also a time when the toy companies footing the animation bill had absolutely no idea how powerful and lasting the connection could be between emotionally-invested kids and the characters they bonded with. It was unintentional, but these shows turned kids into lifelong customers.

Case in point: the vast majority of toys these days are purchased by adults, and sales of big ’80s IPs like ThunderCats, Masters of the Universe and yes, G.I. Joe, are almost entirely driven by fans who grew up with these programs forty years ago.

However, despite the fact that animation houses weren’t focused on building strong shows that could stand on their own, they often came close as writers returned to certain characters more often than others. It may not have been what the toy companies wanted, but it seems to me like the folks pushing pencils and pens were doing their best to add quality wherever and whenever they could.

On the Joe side, it was largely Shipwreck who brought personality as a sassy seagoing slacker. Alpine and Bazooka were a comedy duo (later replaced by bickering buddies Leatherneck and Wetsuit) and anyone who’s watched the show for any length of time knows that the real star of the show wasn’t Duke or Flint or Snake Eyes — it was Lady Jaye. She’s in more episodes than literally any other Joe, and she had no trouble getting things done on every mission. She was the real backbone of the team!

However, even stronger than the Joes were the Cobra troops. Almost all of the named characters had larger-than-life personalities and easily-recognizable quirks that made them endearing to kids. Cobra Commander’s mirror-masked face and shrieking voice made him one of the most iconic villains of the entire decade, but Destro’s sense of honor, deep baritone and silver head also made a strong impression. The Baroness is not only an all-time baddie thanks to her prowess in combat and subterfuge, but she’s always near the top of any ‘hottest’ list and the seed of domme fantasies cropping up later in a fan’s life. The finish-each-other’s-sentence twins Tomax and Xamot were never far from the fore, and Zartan’s penchant for disguise kept us guessing. Anytime a random civilian or scientist showed up, there was at least a 50% chance it would turn out to be Zartan!

With this core cast established, the writers dabbled in creating touchstones which could have been leveraged into meatier content — Several episodes referenced the secret Cobra base located in Springfield, we learned that Shipwreck was adopted and Scarlett came from a large family of martial arts experts, the renegade Zarana secretly pined for humble PC tech Mainframe, and so on. These rare glimpses of the Joes as people with histories, interests and lives off the battlefield were some of G.I. Joe‘s best moments of character elevation.

Unfortunately, one of the biggest missed character opportunities was late in the series when a new toy push from Hasbro began. The majority of established Joe characters were swapped out with unknown people overnight, and it was a huge surprise to see so many new faces arrive with no introduction, while all the old favorites just… went away? An obvious move would have been to write in a more formalized ‘changing of the guard’ or to give some pretense of soldiers being reassigned, but we didn’t get one.

Another huge miss was when one of these new characters, Serpentor, showed up and displaced Cobra Commander as supreme leader. It caused huge strife in the Cobra ranks, and in a few episodes we see Cobra Commander actively undermining this usurper, to the point that he was sabotaging Serpentor’s campaigns and leaving him unguarded in the hopes that G.I. Joe would either capture or kill him. This inter-agency conflict could have been an entire seasonal arc shown from Cobra’s perspective, but this incredibly juicy concept is barely touched on.

Despite the fact that G.I. Joe never reached its full dramatic potential, it was still a fun ride. Beyond straight-up nostalgia, there were plenty of absolutely crazy episodes — and for my money, the best Joe stories are the ones when something totally off-the-wall happens, like seeing Shipwreck get brainwashed into believing he woke up from a coma and is now married with a daughter, or when Lady Jaye goes to Destro’s ancestral mansion and finds a Cthulhu-type monster in the basement. Let’s not forget the town with giant plants running amok, or that time Shipwreck fell in love with a mermaid. And, one of the all-timers is surely when the Joes read a bedtime story to orphans and it turned the whole episode into a fractured version of Grimm’s fairy tales to score many genuine laugh-out-loud moments.

Unfortunately, the Sunbow run ends with a random episode that doesn’t act as any kind of coda, nor does it cap anything off or tie anything up. I have to assume it’s because Hasbro knew they would be transferring the series to DIC, so it was kind of a non-event. However, we semi-transition between animation houses with G.I. Joe: the Movie, and after having just rewatched it, I was impressed with how well it stands up after all this time.

The movie is somewhat divisive because some fans feel it veers away from standard military action by incorporating fantasy, sci-fi and body horror elements. However, I would counter that taking even a cursory look at a list of episode synopses reveals that G.I. Joe has a huge number of fantastical episodes — in fact, they probably do more fantasy and sci-fi than realistic military action overall, so folks who think the movie goes too far might want to reconsider.

Also, it must be said that the musical intro sequence to the film is utterly badass.

If nothing else, the movie serves as a good stopping point for the Sunbow series by bringing back many fan favorite characters that had been phased out of episodic content with the big Hasbro push, while also adding a huge amount of new lore and story elements for longtime fans to chew on — namely, the hidden, bioengineered history of a secret society called Cobra-La and how it relates to Cobra itself. Was it a retcon? Of course it was, but it was an easy one to believe in, and as far as I’m concerned, it was terribly cool.

And the icing on the movie’s cake? We got backstory on Cobra Commander himself, including why he wears his iconic mask and we even get to see what he looks like underneath it! That very issue was something that provided endless debate on the playground, so to get it settled definitively was incredible. Also, Cobra Commander’s story ends in the film via a genuinely tragic sequence of events, bringing a level of gravitas that we rarely got in this IP.

Speaking of gravitas, it was widely reported that Hasbro was planning to kill G.I. Joe leader Duke during the movie in an effort to ‘reboot’ the toy line, similar to the way they killed Optimus Prime in Transformers: the Movie, but after the huge backlash TF:tM received, they decided to change course at the last minute and re-recorded voice lines in order to suggest that Duke survives. When you watch the film it’s pretty clear that he wasn’t meant to live, but even with this awkward fix, it was ultimately the correct choice and ends the Sunbow era on the right note.

Despite all the typically-’80s things that might be wrong with the series in hindsight, it was still great to to go back into this cartoon and revisit characters and stories that I hadn’t seen in so long. There’s genuine fun to be had here, as long as one remembers that the show is a product of its time.

I’m also happy to report that the spirit of G.I. Joe has lived on past the ’80s.

First, for folks who want to see more, there are there two excellent and highly recommended follow-ups – G.I. Joe: Resolute and G.I. Joe: Renegades. Even though they’re not direct continuations of the original source material, they’re both outstanding spinoffs that have a lot to offer Joe fans. Also, folks who get the itch and would like to track down toys inspired by the ’80s vintage action figures can check into G.I. Joe: Classified, a series of figures and vehicles which revive the plastic spirit of the Joes, but also update them with modern designs, better materials and superior articulation.

I’m quite glad that I went back and rewatched this landmark series from so many years ago. It’s far from perfect and seeing it through rose-colored glasses certainly papered over some of the rough patches I didn’t notice much as a kid, but even when seen from a clear-eyed modern-day perspective, it’s easy to know why G.I. Joe made such a lasting impression and remains a popular property, even to this day.

…And knowing is half the battle!

The post CARTOON TIME: G.I. Joe, 42 Years Later appeared first on Gamecritics.com.