The original release of The Tomorrow Children, a self-described “altruistic cooperative world-building adventure game” by director and founder of Kyoto-based developer Q-Games Dylan Cuthbert, was caught and ultimately stranded in no-man’s land. Released as a free-to-play title in 2016 before games like Fortnite, Genshin Impact and others made the format popular on consoles, in the end, Sony Interactive Entertainment, the game’s original publisher, shut The Tomorrow Children’s servers down after just one year in service.
But now, after years of back and forth between Q-Games and SIE, The Tomorrow Children: Phoenix Edition will be re-released for PS4 and PS5 (as a PS4 enhanced title) on September 6, 2022. The team at Q-Games has taken special care in ensuring the untimely demise of the original release will not be repeated here: switching from servers to a peer-to-peer online model and supporting a fully offline single-player experience, though Cuthbert recommends playing the game co-operatively online for the optimal experience.
The Tomorrow Children: Phoenix Edition. Credit: Q-Games.
The Tomorrow Children: Phoenix Edition as a game is difficult to neatly summarise. It has touches of Minecraft’s crafting, hints of Animal Crossing-style town builder mechanics and some Valheimmonster killing and resource management all wrapped up in a Soviet inspired aesthetic. In fact, it is this aesthetic that will stand out first and foremost. The character models take heavy inspiration from Czech and other ex-soviet marionette dolls, giving every interaction with your mysterious overseer a very deliberate creepy edge. The Soviet design runs deeply in the game, going so far as to having to report to a Department of Labour to collect rewards for your hard work rebuilding a society swallowed by the mysterious void. This art style deeply benefits The Tomorrow Children: Phoenix Edition, both in looking timeless and incredibly crisp, especially running on a PS5, whilst also standing out from other adventure/world-building games that have been released in the years since this game’s closure.
The gameplay is simple enough, especially once past Phoenix Edition’s new in-game tutorial, which the original release lacked and feels vital in getting to grips with the world and objectives. You are responsible for mining and collecting certain crafting materials, such as wood and precious metals, from islands forming in the void around your town. You use these materials to build structures like electricity plants and crafting tables that allow you to build out your town further and ultimately save humanity. Thanks to Phoenix Edition’s new single-player enhancements, in-game AI will help with some of that busy work, like transporting materials from the island that you’re exploring straight back to your personal town. This is helpful as your character has limited inventory space, allowing you to focus on exploring rather than ferrying blocks of wood around.
The Tomorrow Children: Phoenix Edition. Credit: Q-Games.
These void islands initially look like a procedurally generated space, with otherworldly spikes and caverns forming elaborate rock formations. In actuality, they are created and curated by the developers. This removes that dreaded feeling of getting stuck in a space the game has randomly made without consideration of player mobility and means that there are hidden treasures throughout each of these islands. For example, I used one of the game’s new Void powers to slam through a big rock, uncovering a hidden Matryoshka doll inside which, when processed through one of the unlockable building structures, adds a new villager to your town.
For the first part of my preview, I played through the different tutorials, which were hands-off enough to allow for self-discovery whilst also gently nudging you in the right direction. For the second part of my preview, I was taken to a much more developed island populated with the Q-games team. This is where the scope of what can and can’t be done in The Tomorrow Children: Phoenix Edition became apparent.
The Tomorrow Children: Phoenix Edition. Credit: Q-Games.
Where in my solo town there was nothing more than a few small buildings, here there were parks, trees, buses and electric scooters zipping around me. Other people flying off into the distance with jet packs, climbing giant monolithic structures with grappling hooks. Different vendors, once locked behind the original release’s free-to-play microtransactions, selling goods with in-game currency. In the sky, giant stingray-looking monsters fired upon the town, people scrambled onto giant cannons to fight them off. There was a very real sense that this town was indeed, alive. This plays beautifully in the overall objective of the game itself: to save humanity from the void. With other games of this style, the game’s narrative direction gets lost in the day-to-day humdrum of running a settlement. For The Tomorrow Children: Phoenix Edition, that humdrum is the very goal of the game. Become a model citizen, and live a life. Help your fellow person.
There are some wrinkles in the overall design that I feel might be showing their age here. These ranged from minor things, like spongy gun mechanics, to some more significant oversights, like a lack of storage space for tools and items ultimately leading to cardboard boxes filled with pickaxes and rocket launchers littering the town, which felt a bit dissatisfying. Customisability-wise, there are new outfits for your character to earn and purchase but there aren’t the same levels of terraforming and town personalisation as one would find in something like Animal Crossing. But the placement of buildings, trees and parks as well as sign building and other personalisation touches that are there, though not massively diverse, will help keep your town feeling uniquely yours.
When The Tomorrow Children was shut down, many critics and fans alike spoke favourably about how ahead of its time the game was. The beautifully distinctive and novel character design, the sense of discovery on the ever-changing void islands, and the collective joy of working together with strangers to achieve one goal, whether that be defending the town from monsters or successfully navigating a park seesaw. With The Tomorrow Children: Phoenix Edition’s quality of life improvements, graphical improvements and much-needed preservationist approach to online play, Q-Games’ time might be now. And certainly will live on until tomorrow.
The Tomorrow Children: Phoenix Edition launches on September 6 in Europe and September 7 in Japan. This preview was played on PS5.
The original release of The Tomorrow Children, a self-described “altruistic cooperative world-building adventure game” by director and founder of Kyoto-based developer Q-Games Dylan Cuthbert, was caught and ultimately stranded in no-man’s land. Released as a free-to-play title in 2016 before games like Fortnite, Genshin Impact and others made the format popular on consoles, in the end, Sony Interactive Entertainment, the game’s original publisher, shut The Tomorrow Children’s servers down after just one year in service.
But now, after years of back and forth between Q-Games and SIE, The Tomorrow Children: Phoenix Edition will be re-released for PS4 and PS5 (as a PS4 enhanced title) on September 6, 2022. The team at Q-Games has taken special care in ensuring the untimely demise of the original release will not be repeated here: switching from servers to a peer-to-peer online model and supporting a fully offline single-player experience, though Cuthbert recommends playing the game co-operatively online for the optimal experience.
The Tomorrow Children: Phoenix Edition. Credit: Q-Games.
The Tomorrow Children: Phoenix Edition as a game is difficult to neatly summarise. It has touches of Minecraft’s crafting, hints of Animal Crossing-style town builder mechanics and some Valheimmonster killing and resource management all wrapped up in a Soviet inspired aesthetic. In fact, it is this aesthetic that will stand out first and foremost. The character models take heavy inspiration from Czech and other ex-soviet marionette dolls, giving every interaction with your mysterious overseer a very deliberate creepy edge. The Soviet design runs deeply in the game, going so far as to having to report to a Department of Labour to collect rewards for your hard work rebuilding a society swallowed by the mysterious void. This art style deeply benefits The Tomorrow Children: Phoenix Edition, both in looking timeless and incredibly crisp, especially running on a PS5, whilst also standing out from other adventure/world-building games that have been released in the years since this game’s closure.
The gameplay is simple enough, especially once past Phoenix Edition’s new in-game tutorial, which the original release lacked and feels vital in getting to grips with the world and objectives. You are responsible for mining and collecting certain crafting materials, such as wood and precious metals, from islands forming in the void around your town. You use these materials to build structures like electricity plants and crafting tables that allow you to build out your town further and ultimately save humanity. Thanks to Phoenix Edition’s new single-player enhancements, in-game AI will help with some of that busy work, like transporting materials from the island that you’re exploring straight back to your personal town. This is helpful as your character has limited inventory space, allowing you to focus on exploring rather than ferrying blocks of wood around.
The Tomorrow Children: Phoenix Edition. Credit: Q-Games.
These void islands initially look like a procedurally generated space, with otherworldly spikes and caverns forming elaborate rock formations. In actuality, they are created and curated by the developers. This removes that dreaded feeling of getting stuck in a space the game has randomly made without consideration of player mobility and means that there are hidden treasures throughout each of these islands. For example, I used one of the game’s new Void powers to slam through a big rock, uncovering a hidden Matryoshka doll inside which, when processed through one of the unlockable building structures, adds a new villager to your town.
For the first part of my preview, I played through the different tutorials, which were hands-off enough to allow for self-discovery whilst also gently nudging you in the right direction. For the second part of my preview, I was taken to a much more developed island populated with the Q-games team. This is where the scope of what can and can’t be done in The Tomorrow Children: Phoenix Edition became apparent.
The Tomorrow Children: Phoenix Edition. Credit: Q-Games.
Where in my solo town there was nothing more than a few small buildings, here there were parks, trees, buses and electric scooters zipping around me. Other people flying off into the distance with jet packs, climbing giant monolithic structures with grappling hooks. Different vendors, once locked behind the original release’s free-to-play microtransactions, selling goods with in-game currency. In the sky, giant stingray-looking monsters fired upon the town, people scrambled onto giant cannons to fight them off. There was a very real sense that this town was indeed, alive. This plays beautifully in the overall objective of the game itself: to save humanity from the void. With other games of this style, the game’s narrative direction gets lost in the day-to-day humdrum of running a settlement. For The Tomorrow Children: Phoenix Edition, that humdrum is the very goal of the game. Become a model citizen, and live a life. Help your fellow person.
There are some wrinkles in the overall design that I feel might be showing their age here. These ranged from minor things, like spongy gun mechanics, to some more significant oversights, like a lack of storage space for tools and items ultimately leading to cardboard boxes filled with pickaxes and rocket launchers littering the town, which felt a bit dissatisfying. Customisability-wise, there are new outfits for your character to earn and purchase but there aren’t the same levels of terraforming and town personalisation as one would find in something like Animal Crossing. But the placement of buildings, trees and parks as well as sign building and other personalisation touches that are there, though not massively diverse, will help keep your town feeling uniquely yours.
When The Tomorrow Children was shut down, many critics and fans alike spoke favourably about how ahead of its time the game was. The beautifully distinctive and novel character design, the sense of discovery on the ever-changing void islands, and the collective joy of working together with strangers to achieve one goal, whether that be defending the town from monsters or successfully navigating a park seesaw. With The Tomorrow Children: Phoenix Edition’s quality of life improvements, graphical improvements and much-needed preservationist approach to online play, Q-Games’ time might be now. And certainly will live on until tomorrow.
The Tomorrow Children: Phoenix Edition launches on September 6 in Europe and September 7 in Japan. This preview was played on PS5.
What comes to mind when you think “live-action” and “video games”? For some of you, this idea will take you back to the lofty days of early video games and FMV (full-motion video). Perhaps the infamous Night Trap. For most people, the only real experience they have had with a story they can interact with are from Netflix specials of varying quality, such as the novel, if flawed Black Mirror: Bandersnatch or the downright bizarre Bear Grylls – You vs. The Wild. Most of these experiences are cartoonish and clumsy, with even the more serious attempts like Bandersnatch never fully exploiting the potential of this kind of storytelling.
For Jack Attridge, co-founder of Flavourworks and director on the company’s 2019 hit Erica, interactive storytelling in this medium isn’t a gimmick or a fun quirk. It’s a lifelong passion. Bringing cinema and video games together to create experiences truly unique in their approach and delivery, all whilst pushing artistic and technological boundaries within both fields. After the success of Erica, Flavourworks is moving onto its new title: Hush. Hush promises to be an upgrade on Erica in every department. For NME, Attridge spoke about the technology of Erica, improving gameplay in Hush and the future of interactive cinema.
As with all creative endeavours, the journey from inception to release for Erica was one built on passion, commitment, dedication, and heaps of good timing. Before Erica was announced at Paris Games Week 2017 as part of Sony’s conference that year, Erica started out on touch devices, as Attridge explained.
“The very first thing that happened with Erica was that we built a demo for an iPad. For touchscreen. What I had in my head was a user interface akin to The Room by Firewood Games. Marrying that with a branching narrative experience. Then I gave a pub demo to one of my old bosses from Rebellion, who was then working at Sony. He told me that Sony was looking for something like this, and asked if I wanted to come in. This was a few months later and, honestly, I couldn’t even remember showing him it!”
Sony ended up loving it, Michael Denny, the VP at the time, said it was the best pitch he had seen in years. They then flew us to San Francisco to meet Shuhei Yoshida, who was the president of PlayStation, so he could play the demo and make sure we weren’t lying about how it works. He gave us a poker-faced nod, the thumbs up and a challenge: how would you bring this to the living room?”
It was this challenge – transitioning away from mobile devices to console hardware – that led to some interesting mechanical thought processes, but ultimately presented a challenge in ensuring Erica’s approachability stayed intact.
“With the DualShock controls, we were originally playing around with the idea of using gyroscope controls. It’s something I think is really interesting, games like Dreamsand Tearaway use gyroscope to great effect, but in the end, we thought it was a little too advanced for some players and for me, I wanted to make sure we made something that my sister or my dad could play.”
Erica. Credit: Flavourworks.
“Part of my game design philosophy now is to make sure we make games for everyone. With video games, there are a lot of layers of abstraction. That means that we as gamers get used to having one stick move a camera whilst one stick moves the person. But that stick doesn’t have an association with walking in real life. If you have never seen a controller before you couldn’t possibly imagine that those sticks are meant to make you walk.”
In the transition from mobile to consoles, Attridge decided to still incorporate touch controls within Erica, whether by using the touchpad on the DualShock 4 or by downloading the accompanying Erica app to use as the input device. Attridge cleverly utilised the prevalence of touch screens within the modern world and partnered that with relatable, real-world actions to ensure that all players, whether seasoned gamers or not, could join in the story. As soon as Erica was released, the metrics proved how effective this model was.
“At the beginning of Erica, it opens with a zippo lighter. We don’t tell the audience how to use it but that sequence has a 100 per cent success rate because they know how a touchscreen works, because they’re everywhere, and they know how hinges work in the real world because that lighter is a model from the real world not a layer of abstraction. For the same reason, we don’t want buttons at the top of the screen, even when there’s a dialogue choice it fills a space in the world, so it’s all a part of the environment.”
Erica. Credit: Flavourworks.
Erica, and all of its real-world assets throughout the game were made possible thanks to Flavourworks’ decision to make an in-house engine, named “Touch Video”, rather than relying on an established engine like Unity or Unreal. While, on the surface, the decision to create a bespoke engine looks like much more effort, in the long run this process actually ended up freeing up Attridge’s programming time on Erica, in a way that traditional video game processes do not allow for.
“With the touch controls, what we were doing was circumventing weeks or months of programming. For example, making an interactive book that has to be modelled and programmed; just turning the page of a book is a lot of work! If you put the effort into animating that book then it’s kind of game dev practice to litter that book throughout the game. Because you don’t build a mechanic unless you’re going to use it over and over again. For us, everything interactive was bespoke. It would take me roughly 15 minutes to film that book opening, tune it to the game engine and then boom – now we have a book mechanic. I can then use that mechanic to open a door, turn a handle, pull a trigger on a gun, and more. We build a few of these systems underneath that we can then film hundreds or thousands of different contexts and then reuse that code and those tuning tools each time. That means we have absolute freedom, not having to rely on copy-pasting a mechanic all the way through the game. It’s been an escape from that language of game design.”
Erica. Credit: Flavourworks.
This freedom shined within Erica, leading to good overall sales, praise from industry veterans like Cory Barlog and Hideo Kojima and the financial ability to expand and start working on new projects. Before any new projects could start, however, Attridge wanted to make sure the environment he and his team worked in was as good as it could be.
“The first thing we wanted to do after Erica was to make sure we created a better working environment for people, because people make games and greatness comes from people who are being treated well and fairly. Erica was project zero for us, we were building a company at the same time as building a game engine, building a team and building a genre. It was an overly ambitious first project. So now we have processes and structure in place that have helped create a much more sustainable and positive work environment.”
The next step is to understand what could be improved upon with Erica. Making engaging, meaningful live-action video games is somewhat untested ground. A lot of processes and decisions made in Erica needed to be fine-tuned, starting with how often a player is tasked with making a choice. This is a process that Attridge has thought about extensively, and has aimed to solve with Flavourworks’ next title – Hush.
Crane. Credit: Flavourworks.
“The important thing for us is that we don’t want you interacting every 5 minutes, because by the time you get to that choice you have forgotten you are playing. You lean back into viewing mode, whereas when you’re engaged you’re leaning forward. The moment you’re leaning back too far and you have forgotten you’re playing a game, you could potentially not be in the mood to play anymore. You’re not always in the mood to play, sometimes you just want to watch, so our goal is to keep the viewer’s minds in that playing state. If you’re absent for too long it breaks the flow and decision-making is less organic, especially if a choice is not meaningfully integrated. So in Hush the player will be engaged every 10 – 15 seconds so that they are always engaged and ready.”
Hush will also present its narrative in a more distinctive way than Erica. Whereas Erica was one story with multiple branching decisions and choices, akin to a choose your own adventure storybook, Hush will feature a series of short, 10 minute stories that all take place on the same night in the fictional city of San Rosa. Attridge frequently compared the experience to Frank Miller’s Sin City. The first story, titled Crane, presents two lovers, both alike in dignity as they share an intimate moment before separating back to their respective gangs. The immediate jump in production quality is apparent early on, as each scene is beautifully shot in 4K, with transitions between scenes, a part of FMV game making that is typically clunky and cumbersome, presented smoothly and elegantly. This is in part due to a bigger budget, alongside technological leaps forward with the Touch Video engine, ensuring that every act the player makes is as meaningful as it can be.
“With Crane, every single interaction pushes the story forward. It’s never something like “walk from one side of the room to the other.” It’s always something that feels interesting, different and important. They’re all really enjoyable moments that the haptics brings to life, from intimate character moments to spinning the barrel of a gun. Then halfway through this episode, depending on the pathway you take, you can get into a live-action gunfight. To do that we have 3D photogrammetry objects in real-time partnered with live-action video where the environment is being shot apart. You’re hiding behind a table with holes being shot through it.”
Crane. Credit: Flavourworks.
This is the most intense part of this initial story. Decisions are being flung at you left and right. Whether to duck for another point of cover, to peak out and shoot, to hunker down and pray. All decisions gamers would normally make with an avatar with no severe consequences. But with Crane, the very fact that this is a real human being presented to
you psychologically raises the stakes astronomically. Then on top of that is the very real threat of failure. Unlike Netflix’s Bear Grylls – You vs. The Wild, where no matter how hard you try, you can’t actually get Mr Grylls to fight an alligator to death, a wrong decision in Crane will get you killed and that ends the story. That’s it. You move onto the next story, with the echoes of that failure ringing out on news feeds across San Rosa in the other stories being told that night. It’s a fascinating way to innovate on the technology and storytelling capabilities the Touch Video engine can offer. This technological improvement has also been applied to the backroom processes of creating this game, to ensure that the high fidelity filming of Flavourworks’ projects never results in bulky download sizes.
“We have also been looking at the technology behind these experiences. Erica, for example, was 40GB as a game on PlayStation because it’s HD video and there’s lots of it. Every time you engage with an object it’s filled with thousands of frames of fidelity. It’s not like you swipe and it plays a clip. Everything is tactile and simulated physics with multiple layers of design. This resulted in a massive file size. What we’ve done with Hush is implement a small download size and then stream in the footage as you play. This allows us to create more without fearing the download size becomes unsustainable. That was a real breakthrough for us with regard to our back-end technology.”
Crane will be released to Samsung Galaxy owners free to play. The roll-out of this first story is something that Attridge is cautious to get right, and he wants to make sure as many people as possible have the opportunity to try it out once it is ready for general release.
“With Crane, we’re putting it out there to get people’s thoughts and show people what our technology is about. It’s not going to be there as a piece of marketing for the bigger thing as the full release of Hush is a while away. When the stories are completed we will not be staggering the release of them. I don’t want to call them episodes because they can be played in any order with different characters portrayed across this one city. When it releases it’ll be just like buying a game, but the sections within the game are broken down non-linearly.”
Crane. Credit: Flavourworks.
The future for Flavourworks, Hush and the technology as a whole is an intriguing one. Attridge hinted at other projects the team is working on, ranging from in-house games like Shackles, a horror title that Attridge tells me will follow a more linear story and explore the touch technology within lighting and sound, through to paid partnerships with 5G providers and European television broadcasters. Attridge showed how the engine can be applied to more traditionally passive artforms. Attridge showed NME the engine working alongside a classic action movie, making the fight scene seem more dynamic and kinetic. The most impressive part was seeing the engine’s educational capabilities when paired with a children’s tv show, making the characters and scenes interactable. Our children and our children’s children have and will continue to grow up alongside touchscreens, so it only makes sense that the shows they watch evolve beyond bad CG remakes of Noddy to something that can both keep them occupied whilst helping them improve dexterity and grow intellectually.
“The thing that drives me on every project is wanting to work with amazing people. Wanting to show them something they haven’t seen anywhere else. When we started the company we asked ourselves “what can we do that isn’t already being done?” I like to think about it like Pixar, though I wouldn’t compare ourselves of course. But when they made Toy Story they mastered rendering plastic. Then Monsters, Inc it was fur. A Bug’s Life it was translucency in leaves and foliage. Finding Nemo was water. Each story pushed the technology forward. If you go to make a Pixar-type movie now, a lot of the groundwork for this technology exists thanks to the work they did before. There are already devs out there making amazing platformers and traditional shooters, what we want to do is make something that is different. I am really grateful to be able to do that.”
Craneis available to play for free now for all Samsung Galaxy owners.
What comes to mind when you think “live-action” and “video games”? For some of you, this idea will take you back to the lofty days of early video games and FMV (full-motion video). Perhaps the infamous Night Trap. For most people, the only real experience they have had with a story they can interact with are from Netflix specials of varying quality, such as the novel, if flawed Black Mirror: Bandersnatch or the downright bizarre Bear Grylls – You vs. The Wild. Most of these experiences are cartoonish and clumsy, with even the more serious attempts like Bandersnatch never fully exploiting the potential of this kind of storytelling.
For Jack Attridge, co-founder of Flavourworks and director on the company’s 2019 hit Erica, interactive storytelling in this medium isn’t a gimmick or a fun quirk. It’s a lifelong passion. Bringing cinema and video games together to create experiences truly unique in their approach and delivery, all whilst pushing artistic and technological boundaries within both fields. After the success of Erica, Flavourworks is moving onto its new title: Hush. Hush promises to be an upgrade on Erica in every department. For NME, Attridge spoke about the technology of Erica, improving gameplay in Hush and the future of interactive cinema.
As with all creative endeavours, the journey from inception to release for Erica was one built on passion, commitment, dedication, and heaps of good timing. Before Erica was announced at Paris Games Week 2017 as part of Sony’s conference that year, Erica started out on touch devices, as Attridge explained.
“The very first thing that happened with Erica was that we built a demo for an iPad. For touchscreen. What I had in my head was a user interface akin to The Room by Firewood Games. Marrying that with a branching narrative experience. Then I gave a pub demo to one of my old bosses from Rebellion, who was then working at Sony. He told me that Sony was looking for something like this, and asked if I wanted to come in. This was a few months later and, honestly, I couldn’t even remember showing him it!”
Sony ended up loving it, Michael Denny, the VP at the time, said it was the best pitch he had seen in years. They then flew us to San Francisco to meet Shuhei Yoshida, who was the president of PlayStation, so he could play the demo and make sure we weren’t lying about how it works. He gave us a poker-faced nod, the thumbs up and a challenge: how would you bring this to the living room?”
It was this challenge – transitioning away from mobile devices to console hardware – that led to some interesting mechanical thought processes, but ultimately presented a challenge in ensuring Erica’s approachability stayed intact.
“With the DualShock controls, we were originally playing around with the idea of using gyroscope controls. It’s something I think is really interesting, games like Dreamsand Tearaway use gyroscope to great effect, but in the end, we thought it was a little too advanced for some players and for me, I wanted to make sure we made something that my sister or my dad could play.”
Erica. Credit: Flavourworks.
“Part of my game design philosophy now is to make sure we make games for everyone. With video games, there are a lot of layers of abstraction. That means that we as gamers get used to having one stick move a camera whilst one stick moves the person. But that stick doesn’t have an association with walking in real life. If you have never seen a controller before you couldn’t possibly imagine that those sticks are meant to make you walk.”
In the transition from mobile to consoles, Attridge decided to still incorporate touch controls within Erica, whether by using the touchpad on the DualShock 4 or by downloading the accompanying Erica app to use as the input device. Attridge cleverly utilised the prevalence of touch screens within the modern world and partnered that with relatable, real-world actions to ensure that all players, whether seasoned gamers or not, could join in the story. As soon as Erica was released, the metrics proved how effective this model was.
“At the beginning of Erica, it opens with a zippo lighter. We don’t tell the audience how to use it but that sequence has a 100 per cent success rate because they know how a touchscreen works, because they’re everywhere, and they know how hinges work in the real world because that lighter is a model from the real world not a layer of abstraction. For the same reason, we don’t want buttons at the top of the screen, even when there’s a dialogue choice it fills a space in the world, so it’s all a part of the environment.”
Erica. Credit: Flavourworks.
Erica, and all of its real-world assets throughout the game were made possible thanks to Flavourworks’ decision to make an in-house engine, named “Touch Video”, rather than relying on an established engine like Unity or Unreal. While, on the surface, the decision to create a bespoke engine looks like much more effort, in the long run this process actually ended up freeing up Attridge’s programming time on Erica, in a way that traditional video game processes do not allow for.
“With the touch controls, what we were doing was circumventing weeks or months of programming. For example, making an interactive book that has to be modelled and programmed; just turning the page of a book is a lot of work! If you put the effort into animating that book then it’s kind of game dev practice to litter that book throughout the game. Because you don’t build a mechanic unless you’re going to use it over and over again. For us, everything interactive was bespoke. It would take me roughly 15 minutes to film that book opening, tune it to the game engine and then boom – now we have a book mechanic. I can then use that mechanic to open a door, turn a handle, pull a trigger on a gun, and more. We build a few of these systems underneath that we can then film hundreds or thousands of different contexts and then reuse that code and those tuning tools each time. That means we have absolute freedom, not having to rely on copy-pasting a mechanic all the way through the game. It’s been an escape from that language of game design.”
Erica. Credit: Flavourworks.
This freedom shined within Erica, leading to good overall sales, praise from industry veterans like Cory Barlog and Hideo Kojima and the financial ability to expand and start working on new projects. Before any new projects could start, however, Attridge wanted to make sure the environment he and his team worked in was as good as it could be.
“The first thing we wanted to do after Erica was to make sure we created a better working environment for people, because people make games and greatness comes from people who are being treated well and fairly. Erica was project zero for us, we were building a company at the same time as building a game engine, building a team and building a genre. It was an overly ambitious first project. So now we have processes and structure in place that have helped create a much more sustainable and positive work environment.”
The next step is to understand what could be improved upon with Erica. Making engaging, meaningful live-action video games is somewhat untested ground. A lot of processes and decisions made in Erica needed to be fine-tuned, starting with how often a player is tasked with making a choice. This is a process that Attridge has thought about extensively, and has aimed to solve with Flavourworks’ next title – Hush.
Crane. Credit: Flavourworks.
“The important thing for us is that we don’t want you interacting every 5 minutes, because by the time you get to that choice you have forgotten you are playing. You lean back into viewing mode, whereas when you’re engaged you’re leaning forward. The moment you’re leaning back too far and you have forgotten you’re playing a game, you could potentially not be in the mood to play anymore. You’re not always in the mood to play, sometimes you just want to watch, so our goal is to keep the viewer’s minds in that playing state. If you’re absent for too long it breaks the flow and decision-making is less organic, especially if a choice is not meaningfully integrated. So in Hush the player will be engaged every 10 – 15 seconds so that they are always engaged and ready.”
Hush will also present its narrative in a more distinctive way than Erica. Whereas Erica was one story with multiple branching decisions and choices, akin to a choose your own adventure storybook, Hush will feature a series of short, 10 minute stories that all take place on the same night in the fictional city of San Rosa. Attridge frequently compared the experience to Frank Miller’s Sin City. The first story, titled Crane, presents two lovers, both alike in dignity as they share an intimate moment before separating back to their respective gangs. The immediate jump in production quality is apparent early on, as each scene is beautifully shot in 4K, with transitions between scenes, a part of FMV game making that is typically clunky and cumbersome, presented smoothly and elegantly. This is in part due to a bigger budget, alongside technological leaps forward with the Touch Video engine, ensuring that every act the player makes is as meaningful as it can be.
“With Crane, every single interaction pushes the story forward. It’s never something like “walk from one side of the room to the other.” It’s always something that feels interesting, different and important. They’re all really enjoyable moments that the haptics brings to life, from intimate character moments to spinning the barrel of a gun. Then halfway through this episode, depending on the pathway you take, you can get into a live-action gunfight. To do that we have 3D photogrammetry objects in real-time partnered with live-action video where the environment is being shot apart. You’re hiding behind a table with holes being shot through it.”
Crane. Credit: Flavourworks.
This is the most intense part of this initial story. Decisions are being flung at you left and right. Whether to duck for another point of cover, to peak out and shoot, to hunker down and pray. All decisions gamers would normally make with an avatar with no severe consequences. But with Crane, the very fact that this is a real human being presented to
you psychologically raises the stakes astronomically. Then on top of that is the very real threat of failure. Unlike Netflix’s Bear Grylls – You vs. The Wild, where no matter how hard you try, you can’t actually get Mr Grylls to fight an alligator to death, a wrong decision in Crane will get you killed and that ends the story. That’s it. You move onto the next story, with the echoes of that failure ringing out on news feeds across San Rosa in the other stories being told that night. It’s a fascinating way to innovate on the technology and storytelling capabilities the Touch Video engine can offer. This technological improvement has also been applied to the backroom processes of creating this game, to ensure that the high fidelity filming of Flavourworks’ projects never results in bulky download sizes.
“We have also been looking at the technology behind these experiences. Erica, for example, was 40GB as a game on PlayStation because it’s HD video and there’s lots of it. Every time you engage with an object it’s filled with thousands of frames of fidelity. It’s not like you swipe and it plays a clip. Everything is tactile and simulated physics with multiple layers of design. This resulted in a massive file size. What we’ve done with Hush is implement a small download size and then stream in the footage as you play. This allows us to create more without fearing the download size becomes unsustainable. That was a real breakthrough for us with regard to our back-end technology.”
Crane will be released to Samsung Galaxy owners free to play. The roll-out of this first story is something that Attridge is cautious to get right, and he wants to make sure as many people as possible have the opportunity to try it out once it is ready for general release.
“With Crane, we’re putting it out there to get people’s thoughts and show people what our technology is about. It’s not going to be there as a piece of marketing for the bigger thing as the full release of Hush is a while away. When the stories are completed we will not be staggering the release of them. I don’t want to call them episodes because they can be played in any order with different characters portrayed across this one city. When it releases it’ll be just like buying a game, but the sections within the game are broken down non-linearly.”
Crane. Credit: Flavourworks.
The future for Flavourworks, Hush and the technology as a whole is an intriguing one. Attridge hinted at other projects the team is working on, ranging from in-house games like Shackles, a horror title that Attridge tells me will follow a more linear story and explore the touch technology within lighting and sound, through to paid partnerships with 5G providers and European television broadcasters. Attridge showed how the engine can be applied to more traditionally passive artforms. Attridge showed NME the engine working alongside a classic action movie, making the fight scene seem more dynamic and kinetic. The most impressive part was seeing the engine’s educational capabilities when paired with a children’s tv show, making the characters and scenes interactable. Our children and our children’s children have and will continue to grow up alongside touchscreens, so it only makes sense that the shows they watch evolve beyond bad CG remakes of Noddy to something that can both keep them occupied whilst helping them improve dexterity and grow intellectually.
“The thing that drives me on every project is wanting to work with amazing people. Wanting to show them something they haven’t seen anywhere else. When we started the company we asked ourselves “what can we do that isn’t already being done?” I like to think about it like Pixar, though I wouldn’t compare ourselves of course. But when they made Toy Story they mastered rendering plastic. Then Monsters, Inc it was fur. A Bug’s Life it was translucency in leaves and foliage. Finding Nemo was water. Each story pushed the technology forward. If you go to make a Pixar-type movie now, a lot of the groundwork for this technology exists thanks to the work they did before. There are already devs out there making amazing platformers and traditional shooters, what we want to do is make something that is different. I am really grateful to be able to do that.”
Craneis available to play for free now for all Samsung Galaxy owners.
Video games have often painted Japan in one of two distinct ways: either within the fantasy of open vistas, samurai and yukata, or the neon-soaked metropolises of Tokyo. Persona 5 for example sets itself within a pretty authentic, for video game standards, version of the Japanese capital. If someone wanted to plan some activities around Tokyo, they could use Persona 5 as inspiration to not only find key spots such as the crossing in Shibuya, the upmarket shopping of Ginza or the youthful energy of Harajuku but places you might not have considered, like Inokashira Park or Asakusa and the beautiful Sensō-ji Buddhist temple located there.
The thing is though, Japan is a very big country. Like, really big. Bigger than the U.K and even bigger than somewhere like Germany, which in my mind is massive for some reason. There is a lot to see in Japan beyond the lights of the Rainbow Bridge, so much so that planning a trip can be a little intimidating. Here’s how Persona 5 Strikers has not only helped me better plan my time in Japan but has re-contextualised my whole experience of it.
In Persona 5 Strikers, the Phantom Thieves have reunited once again for summer vacation! However, there is trouble afoot when new metaverse-esq “jails” start appearing across the country. So, it’s our job to road trip up and down Japan to change hearts and discover who is behind this sinister plot. The Phantom Thieves eventually find themselves travelling to Sendai, Sapporo, Okinawa, Fukuoka (briefly), Kyoto, Osaka and Yokohama. Besides Okinawa which requires either a flight or ferry to get to, the rest of these locations are easily accessible by Japan’s lightning-fast Shinkansen railway lines.
Persona 5 Strikers. Credit: Atlus
I live in Western Japan. Since the pandemic hit, I have restricted my travel to mostly within my prefecture. This has given me an in-depth knowledge of where I live, but not a lot of understanding beyond these invisible walls. Now that Japan is, at least internally, loosening its grip on travel restrictions, the north of the country is becoming more accessible to me. Before Persona 5 Strikers, I would have just stuck with Tokyo, not really knowing what was happening above it. But when the phantom thieves entered the Sendai an area I was only familiar with because of the 2011 Great Eastern Japan Earthquake tragedy, I was suddenly struck with a wanderlust for the city. This is due to how Persona 5 Strikers introduces these locations, through a mixture of the tried and tested formula of historical context as well as through a new and equally important cultural touchstone: food.
Food, after all, is the foundation of a city or region. In a country of any size, the food will vary from north to south, region to region, town to town. Persona 5 Strikers does an outstanding job of introducing food to the player throughout in various ways; from choreographed social events, bought battle items and the games cooking mechanic. When entering Sendai, we are taught in equal parts the history of the city and its founder Date Masamune (who is also a key inspiration for the “anime eyepatch of power”) alongside the region’s signature dish Gyūtan, a dish made from beef tongue. The way the Phantom Thieves fawned over this dish, something that my restricted western palette would have initially rejected, inspired me. So, when I found myself in a counter sushi restaurant one summer’s day and they were serving Gyūtan nigiri, I jumped right in. I would never have batted an eye if it weren’t for the game introducing it to me as a delicious dish, which it absolutely is.
Persona 5 Strikers. Credit: Atlus
But the Phantom Thieves’ travel guide hasn’t just opened my heart to new places and dishes, but has also re-contextualised my experience of Japan as a whole. For example, when Ryuji waxes lyrical about Sapporo ramen, I learned that my favourite style of ramen, miso, is that region’s speciality – so now I have to go to Sapporo! Continuing my ramen tangent, when the gang stop off in Fukuoka and have tonkotsu ramen, they add pickled mustard green to their bowls for that added bit of spice. At that point, I discovered what that amazing green stuff I always add to my ramen was called – and now I have to go to Fukuoka! That kind of discovery is invigorating and makes me relish trying and learning new and unique things.
Beyond the food, Persona 5 Strikers captures the feelings of familiar cities and locations well enough for the game to act as a time capsule for my time here also. Tackling one of the “jails” around Kyoto’s Fushimi Inari was a particular highlight. The game manages to distil the blend of awe and intimidation felt when confronted with seas of torii gates in a smart and compact manner. Walking through Shinsekai in Osaka, I found myself instinctually grabbing kushikatsu with full knowledge of not needing additional health items, just because that’s what I would do in Shinsekai (small kushikatsu disclaimer: NEVER double dip your stick in the dipping sauce. Don’t do it. That would be gross). The energy and life of the street, eventually leading to the famous Tsūtenkaku tower and the location of one of the game’s final jails makes me want to immediately go back and experience it for myself once again.
So, when the time eventually comes where life returns to a new normal, use Persona 5 Strikers as a starting point for your trip to Japan. Because through the Phantom Thieves summer road trip, we get to experience a video game version of Japan we rarely get to enjoy. One that acknowledges that Japan is a vast, complex, beautiful place that offers more than just kimono, bright lights and big cities.
Persona 5 Strikers is available on PC, PS4, PS5 and Nintendo Switch. We recently named Persona 5 Strikers as one of our best games of 2021 – you can give it a look to see where it ranked.
Not many developers and game makers have the resume of Giles Goddard. His work with Argonaut Games in the 1990s led him to move to Kyoto in his late teens to work with Nintendo on the now legendary Star Foxseries. His impact on the video game scene is monumental enough that he had most of an episode of Netflix’s video game documentary High Score dedicated to his work on bringing 3D graphics to the sprite-heavy, 16-bit SNES alongside fellow Argonaut Games employee and Q-Games founder Dylan Cuthbert. But Giles is a lot more than Star Fox. For over two decades, Giles has worked within and as a subsidiary of Nintendo, opened his own company and is now the current CEO of indie developer and publisher Chuhai Labs. On the eve of the rebranded studio’s first anniversary, NME spoke with Giles about everything but Star Fox.
Prior to his independent move, Giles has credited in a whole host of Nintendo 64 titles. He famously programmed the stretchy face from hell that is the Mario 64start screen, alongside other defining titles such as 1080° Snowboarding. But once Nintendo transitioned to the Gamecube, and Giles opened his own studio Vitei Backroom, his body of work seemed to diminish. That is thanks to Vitei’s role within Nintendo’s EAD (Entertainment Analysis & Development Division), as Giles explained to NME.
“At the time, we felt like we were a part of Nintendo EAD but in a different building in a different part of Kyoto. We were very well connected and always had some prototype progression going on. Someone at Nintendo would look at it and ask if we could do this and change that. We’d suggest things and praise other things. There was a constant back and forth of prototypes.”
Giles explained to me that, at first, this arrangement was perfect for Vitei. Around the turn of the century, there weren’t many indie game studios on the market. There wasn’t the vibrant community of players and developers alike to keep companies afloat off of their own backs. Having Nintendo pay a studio like Vitei to produce prototypes for their hardware is the perfect way to gain some independence without the financial risk. However, Giles explained to me a major drawback of this working arrangement and the reason his body of work seems to thin around this time.
“You can spend entire decades making prototypes with Nintendo because they fund those prototypes but they might not necessarily make games from them.”
Cursed To Golf. Credit: Chuhai Labs
Giles continued: “One [GameCube prototype] that particularly stands out was a puppets game, where you basically control the puppets against a backdrop of scenery that you put up there yourself. So the way you would get backlighting is that the player would have to physically place the lights in the scenery. So you would have a theme and then make a puppet show and the in-game audience would clap or boo depending on how well you were doing the performance. It was great fun, and Nintendo thought it was a great prototype but they didn’t see the potential to make it a mass-market game. It is my favourite prototype I have ever worked on.”
This prototype was being developed around the same time that a “Mario-nette” title was rumoured to be working on – a game that blended Mario with puppetry. Considering how the Mario IP has been warped and changed over the years, it wouldn’t have been a stretch to see Mario utilised within the realms of this prototype. However, as Giles told me, “no matter how good the prototype is from a second-party, early indie studio. Giving them an IP like Mario was just impossible.”
Giles continued to tell me that during this time, stretching through the Gamecube right into the Nintendo Wii era, Vitei worked on “15 or 20 prototypes for potentially really great games that could have come out.” One, in particular, represents a particularly painful missed opportunity for Giles.
Cursed To Golf. Credit: Chuhai Labs
“I had a frisbee game I really wanted to make for the Wii. It’s one of my biggest regrets not pushing for that frisbee game harder. When the Wii released the Wiimote+, it had accelerometers, sixth-axis and could detect your position much more accurately. That would have been perfect for a frisbee game and I am a huge frisbee guy so there were lots of those more interactive games I wanted to make with the controllers post-GameCube.”
Even though there is clear frustration within Giles about some of these missed opportunities, this hasn’t soured his love for Nintendo hardware. Some of Vitei’s success stories come via Nintendo’s smash-hit handheld, the DS. Titles like Steel Diver and sequel Steel Diver: Sub Wars managed to utilise the DS’s unique split-screen hardware to great effect. Giles spoke to me about the unique approach a developer has to take when working with the Japanese giant.
“With almost all Nintendo hardware, they always try to get developers to make games to specifically fit the hardware. Whether that be the two screens of a DS or a remote you can move around. They always try to make the developers utilise the controls and display as much as possible. So, with the DS the main question was how can we use two screens? So, you would always be compromising with the things you can do with the hardware at all the points.”
He adds: “That has always been the most interesting thing about Nintendo hardware. Ask yourself: “with the available hardware you have, how do you compromise to make the game possible?” They always make the most interesting hardware. Taking two screens and making that into a console, nobody in their right mind would do that. It’s an insane idea! But it forces the developer to think “how do I change the concept of what a game is based on this hardware?” I have always liked that aspect of the way Nintendo makes games.”
Nintendo Switch OLED Model. Credit: Nintendo
This constant problem solving has gone on to shape Giles’ approach to making games generally.
“For me, game design has always been about hardware driving the game design. That’s where you get the interesting ideas, you get a new piece of kit, you try new ideas out and think “alright, based on this new way of making games, I can now make this game I could never make before.” That has always been the most interesting part, for me personally, about game design.”
So now we live in 2021, where hardware limitations are borderline non-existent. With home consoles having millions of times more processing power than consoles of old, what are the key challenges to making games today? For Giles, that answer is simple: game engines.
“When it comes to limitations, it’s usually software that is the limiting factor, not the hardware. Especially with things like Unreal and Unity. Because, as a developer, you have no control over how it’s made, you just have to use it. So if it doesn’t work, there’s nothing you can do about it.
Halloween Forever. Credit: Imaginary Monsters
“In the past, we made all of our own engines but now we have to use Unreal or Unity or whatever. When you make your own engine, you know exactly how it worked. So if there was a problem, you would know what was wrong with it and how to fix it. If Unreal or Unity breaks, it’s difficult to find out why it has broken and that can be very frustrating. Also, when we made engines we would also tailor the performance for each game, which you just can’t do with off-the-wall products.”
Giles goes on to explain that it is possible to take a black-box engine like Unreal and create a more bespoke product, citing 17-bit’s recent VR title Song In The Smoke as a shining example of this, but Giles tells me that this process is “very time consuming, very painful. It’s not ideal.”
However, for all the pain that using a modern game engine can give you, Giles does confess that these tools does make the initial prototype phase easier. This very early stage of development, before any textures, graphics or user interfaces are programmed in is, according to Giles, one of the most important parts of creating a great game.
“Engines like Unreal and Unity make the initial prototype very easy to figure out whether it will be a good game or not. Whatever hardware you have, whatever APIs or game engine you’re using, you can still make a basic game out of it and you know quite quickly whether it will be good or not. Forget about graphics and everything, just find out whether there is a game there or not. That has always been my philosophy.”
That philosophy has guided Giles through the early years of Vitei and now through to Chuhai Labs, the rebrand of the Vitei name. One year into this project, Chuhai Labs has already helped publish the delightfully spooky platformer Halloween Forever, are developing the much anticipated Cursed To Golf, which has been previewed by NMEand released a spiritual successor to one of Giles’ most iconic titles with VR game Carve Snowboarding. Carve and 1080° Snowboarding are some of Giles’ most accomplished works – making the very kinetic experience of snowboarding feel good through a controller and headset. It’s his work on these titles that brings Giles significant pride. Not only for their success, but the problem solving needed to make the mechanics work in the first place.
“The thing I am probably most proud of is the horribly complicated physics that I made for the snowboard. People think it’s programmed as a snowboard, but actually, it’s a 4-wheeled car that’s going down the slope, and the snowboard is sliding around inside that car. It was the only way I could work out how to make the rotations that helped actuate you on the slope was by having the 4 clear points of the car as reference. I think that’s the thing that stands out the most. Interestingly enough, when we were making Carve we used a very similar system. But rather than 4 points this time it was just 2 points and you control the tilt.”
“I think the thing that stands out most for me was that you could take something that people think is an extremely complicated gameplay mechanic and just simplify it down to very basic components. It doesn’t matter how complex it is, if it feels right it feels right. For physics games, it’s all about that feel.”
Giles Goddard is an industry legend. There’s no denying his monumental impact on the medium we love. But what is so striking about speaking with him is not only his passion for the things he makes and the obvious wealth of knowledge he has about game creation, but the distinct lack of arrogance or pomposity surrounding him. He made Star Fox, he has every right to sing about this to the high heavens. But Giles is a creator who chooses not to be defined by just one project, or using that clout to propel himself into every conversation about the world’s most successful programmers. Instead, Giles celebrates the people around him at Chuhai Labs. Instead of glitzy 1-year anniversary celebrations broadcasted with his name and image splashed everywhere, he hosts a party for friends, standing around a BBQ cooking yakitori. Chatting about the industry that, after all this time, he still loves. With reckless abandon.
Michael Weber is a freelance journalist based in Japan, and frequent contributor to NME
Cursed To Golf, by creator Liam Edwards and the development team over at Chuhai Labs in Kyoto, is poised to wrestle the frenetic roguelike genre into collared shirts and docker-style shorts. But don’t be mistaken into thinking this game is your bog-standard arcade golf affair, or a complete snooze.
Sure, its core mechanics borrow heavily from classic arcade golf games like Mario Golf and it certainly offers a much more relaxed experience compared to its roguelike contemporaries, but these links aren’t a walk in the park. These par 5’s will leave you quaking at the knees and if you’re not careful, a fairway closer to destruction.
The core gameplay is simple enough. You have three clubs, a driver (all power, little control), and iron (some power with more favourable angles) and then the wedge (excellent control but little forward momentum). Cursed To Golf cleverly avoids throwing too many clubs at you, as the real challenge lies in how you navigate these massive dungeon-like holes. The key item you will use to do this are the Ace Cards.
Cursed To Golf. Credit: Chuhai Labs
Ace Cards vary in power depending on how far in the game you are, and directly affect how you can maneuver within a course, or what pathways you can choose to explore. For example, at one junction of my playthrough, I was presented with two different paths to choose from. However, one of those was filled with TNT, one of Cursed To Golf’s many environmental hazards. I could have just wasted the shot to destroy the TNT and my ball in the process, but instead I used the “practice shot” card, which reset the ball back to my starting location after it has settled without counting to my total allotted shots, but will permanently affect course hazards, such as TNT. Boom (literally), TNT gone and a new pathway cleared.
There is an undeniable joy in finding the best ways through these massive constructs, especially considering that the initial 5 shots you start with dry up very quickly. Every drive, chip, approach and bunker shot counts, with adorable little pop-ups and animations ramping up the tension throughout. By the time I made it to the end of the hole, I had one shot remaining. As I’m weighing my options, the screen turns a tint of red. A thumping heartbeat replaces the splendid 8-bit soundtrack. I am a fair distance from the cup. All I have is my driver, and the ability to shatter my ball into three via an Ace Card. I shoot my shot. By some miracle, one of the three balls sinks into the cup, completing the hole, letting my cursed golfer survive another day and causing myself and game director Liam Edwards to leap from our chairs in joy.
Liam told me that some people have described Cursed To Golf as “the Dark Souls of golf”. I happen to agree with them to an extent. The game will punish you hard for even the slightest shanked ball. But unlike Dark Souls, Cursed To Golf packages this pain in such an adorable, approachable and downright addictive package, I never felt defeated. Just ready to try again.
Cursed To Golf is scheduled to release in 2022 on Nintendo Switch and PC.
What do you think of when I say “golf”? The very word evokes images of garish outfits, lush greens, and middle-aged white people. Though I can’t attest to being an expert in the sport, I can’t visualise golf having the same death-defying, adrenaline-pumping, heart-pounding moment-to-moment action that other sports can offer. You’re not going to break your leg trying to pull off a 360° tail-whip off of a 3-metre vert ramp playing golf, though you might get a bit of sunburn having a nice walk, riding around in cool golf buggies and deciding whether your approach shot would be better served by an 8 or a 9-iron.
So, when I visited Chuhai Labs, an indie studio based in Kyoto headed by industry legend Giles Goddard, I was taken aback when Cursed To Golf creator and game director Liam Edwards told me that this game was “a golf roguelike”. A roguelike? You mean the twitch-control heavy murder-fests popularised by titles like The Binding Of Isaac and Hades? Surely not. But after playing through the first hour of the game, I am now convinced. Golf has indeed gone rogue.
When I first booted up the game, the most obvious thing to notice is just how gorgeous its 2D art style is, especially for a game that, according to Edwards, only started development in earnest in February of this year. This is due in part to Edwards committing to an incredibly small team consisting of industry talent like composer Mark Sparling (A Short Hike) and key artist Hiroco Shiino (Yo-kai Watch). The game blends pixel-art sprites and backdrops with an incredibly clean and crisp UI that makes everything delightfully clear and easy to read. Readability is something that Edwards takes seriously, as he explained to me.
Cursed To Golf. Credit: Chuhai Labs
“A lot of people might think it’s blasphemous to put a clean UI over pixel art, and I get that because pixel art is gorgeous but it can be difficult to read. So we didn’t want to use pixel fonts or pixel art cards. We wanted these things to stand out on top of the game world.”
When I hit start, my adorable golfer tumbles down to what Edwards describes as “golf purgatory”. He took the time to run me through the beginning of the story.
“The story is inspired by a play called “The Everyman”. When the cursed golfer was alive they were the Tiger Woods of their universe. The idea is that they’re about to win this tournament, and at the last shot, the shot which will immortalise them as a golfing legend, lightning strikes and they fall down to golf purgatory, where our golfer is trapped. The many colourful characters you meet throughout your journey will talk about “ascending”. The idea is that if you can complete these 18-holes, you will ascend out of golf purgatory.”
These 18-holes will make up the core experience of Cursed To Golf. It is within this mode, colourfully named “tee-off”, where the core of the story will be told and the place where players will start to be introduced to the games roguelike features, starting with the holes themselves.
Cursed To Golf. Credit: Chuhai Labs
“The adventure mode will consist of 18-holes across 4 different biomes: Purgatory, The Oasis, The Crystal Caverns and another we’re not talking about yet. Though this sounds quite compact for the adventure mode, you will realise that each hole is this massive structure within itself. So, it does feel like an adventure rather than a round of golf, especially when you see them across the course map. We have many different types of hazards across the different biomes as well, such as TNT, because golf wasn’t quite exciting enough. Golf could always use more TNT.”
The roguelike features extend further, with each round of 18-holes being different from the last, thanks to the nefarious Greenskeeper randomly assigning holes from a bank of up to 80 possible choices. However, unlike other roguelikes, these holes are not randomly generated, something that Edwards looked into early in the development cycle.
“We tried experimenting with randomly generated levels at the beginning, but it turned out that these levels just didn’t feel as good for hitting golf balls around as the levels we purposely designed. So instead we made as many of these crafted experiences as possible to help bolster the game’s replayability.”
Cursed To Golf. Credit: Chuhai Labs
Edwards’s attention to detail also limits which holes can be used when, as he continued to explain.
“Each biome offers unique hazards and gameplay opportunities, which means we can’t just re-skin a level depending on the biome. The banks of levels are separated by their respective biome: with the first area, the area players will play most, having a bank of 40 holes. When considering you will only ever play 5 holes in biome 1 per run, that’s a lot of possibilities for the players.”
But here’s where things get interesting. The golf itself is actually quite easy. Unlike other arcade golfers like the Mario Golfseries, we only have three clubs to choose from: driver, iron and wedge. There are no time limits on completing the hole themselves (though Edwards is looking to introduce a separate time trial mode later in development), instead giving the player a 5-ball limit, with the option to earn extra shots through smashable idols dotted around each of the holes. Edwards went on to tell me how important it was to make the game as approachable as possible.
“Although it is a roguelike and will be a challenge, what we don’t want is hitting the ball itself to be the challenge. We want it to feel good, and get players excited about the different types of shots they can hit. The challenge is in how you navigate each of the holes. The idea is that the hitting the shots part is as simple as it should be. It’s more about how you use ace cards.”
Cursed To Golf. Credit: Chuhai Labs
Ace Cards are what Edwards describes as Cursed To Golf’s “secret sauce”. Throughout the game you will earn and purchase these cards that act like power-ups throughout the course of the game. These can range from simple upgrades like a mulligan or adding +1 to your shot count to ridiculous game-altering powers like thunderballs and portals. These cards are the avenue which allows Cursed To Golf to move away from a simple arcade golf game to a hard-as-nails trial of mental fortitude.
Each hole becomes a tactical war between completing the hole in as few shots as possible for better rewards versus hoarding cards for those later levels. Moving the skill focus away from the act of hitting the ball to how to manipulate the ball throughout the hole is what makes Cursed To Golf stand out amongst the ever-increasing wave of roguelikes. Cursed To Golf will both extend a hand in making the simple act of driving a ball super satisfying, whilst ripping out your throat with hazards and false pathways. It’s electrifying.
Cursed To Golf, at its core, is a game that celebrates the simple pleasures of golf. A game that understands that playing the game doesn’t have to be a challenge in itself. Edwards and his team have a clear goal with Cursed To Golf: make golf fun. Thankfully, as Edwards told me, a lot of that fun is already distilled in the sport itself. A sport perfect for the roguelike treatment.
“What Cursed To Golf is about is the fun of golf. The objective joy from hearing the clink of a well struck ball. If you go to a driving range, everybody inherently understands how to smack a ball. For us, there is an element to golf that everybody understands. You just hit a ball in one direction. For other roguelikes, it’s all about pure skill. For something like Hades it’s about the progression of the story.”
“For us, Cursed To Golf is all about learning. Like in the real world, when you play 18-holes of golf that’s not the end of you playing golf. You haven’t completed golf. You think about what went well and what you could do better and then you go again. Of course, we have a fully actualised story but at the same time it’s golf, it’s still a sport and we want you to get better.”
Cursed To Golf is scheduled to release in 2022 on Nintendo Switch and PC.
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