LESS T_T
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The Chinese Room, the British developer known for walking simulators like Dear Esther, Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, revealed their new game, Total Dark.
Apparently it's not like their past games. It's a "much more traditional", systems-driven isometric RPG inspired by pnp systems.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/04/01/total-dark-announcement/
Apparently it's not like their past games. It's a "much more traditional", systems-driven isometric RPG inspired by pnp systems.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/04/01/total-dark-announcement/
Despite having made his studio’s name with three slow-paced and contemplative games, with no guns or stats to get in the way of the narrative and the view, Pinchbeck is an unlikely pioneer for the walking simulator. His early gaming memories are of RPGs and playing with pen and paper rule systems, and that’s where Total Dark comes from.
“It’s a much more traditional game, an isometric adventure with a free-floating camera and lots of mechanics. That will make some people happy while other people are going to wonder if we have the right experience to make that sort of game. But we absolutely do. Because most people know us because of Dear Esther and now Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, it’s easy to assume that’s the kind of game we will always make and have always made. What they may not realise is that we were developing other mods alongside Dear Esther. One of them was Antlion Soccer.”
[...]
“Total Dark actually started off as an RPG boardgame. A lot of the inspiration came from pen and paper and gamebook systems. Traveller, Paranoia, Twilight 2000. I’ve been looking at loads of paper-based RPGs and wargame systems.
“I love how those books retained a scrappy bedroom aesthetic. Modern stuff is so glossy, but with early RPG and wargame systems you can see that it’s just a couple of people in a bedroom scratching out line drawings. It’s very energetic.”
Pinchbeck reckons there’s even a possibility of releasing the physical, tabletop version of the game in some form. For now, energies are directed toward the PC version though and Pinchbeck isn’t entirely sure what the game will look like when it’s ready for release. He’s sure about one thing though. Development will be much more open.
“It’s such a relief to be able to talk about the game during development. We had to keep quiet with Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture but now we’re working on PC, without a publisher, and we can talk about the whole process. We’re aiming to have a playable prototype by the end of April, at which point we’ll have worked out a lot of the systems, but since we last spoke [around a month ago] we’ve completely gutted a lot of what was in the game.
“One thing I can say is that it has a lighter tone. We’ve made three very heavy games now and it’s time for something lighter. It’s no less weird but it’s not quite as bleak.”