A game from a small French studio dominated The Game Awards in Los Angeles Thursday night. “Clair Obscur: Expedition 33” won not only Best Independent Game, but Best Debut Indie Game, Best Game Direction, Best Narrative, Best Art Direction, Best Score, Best Performance, Best RPG, and, of course, the night’s highest honor — Game of the Year.
I’m happy for “Clair Obscur,” which charmed the crowd as each developer ascended the main stage to accept awards in uniform red berets. But despite having a hand in the game’s nomination to so many categories — NPR is among the over 150 international publications the Game Awards polls to form its shortlist — I wish other indies had their own moments to shine, from visual memoirs like “Consume Me” to innovative puzzlers like “Blue Prince.”
As I sat in the theater, watching “Clair Obscur” make history, I became less interested in the awards themselves and more intrigued by the other half of this media spectacle: the previews. As creator and host Geoff Keighley told me in an interview conducted a week before the show, the ceremony exists to “celebrate the best and see what’s next.” I can’t cover every “exclusive world premiere” in this article, but I’ll highlight a few that I can provide additional context for.
One of two games partnering with Wizards of the Coast, the owner of “Dungeons & Dragons,” “Warlock” translates the roleplaying game’s turn-based combat into open-world, spellslinging action. I spoke with Jeff Hattem, vice president of Invoke Studios, about why the team, which previously made the ill-fated “Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance,” was drawn to this iconic eldritch character class.
“Warlocks, they rank very highly in terms of classes that players like to play,” said Hattem.
“They use charisma to deal damage. That always struck me as interesting. How does that translate to magic? The kind of person that would walk into a room and everyone would just stop talking, there would be a hush. Warlocks, they gain their magical abilities by convincing some of the most powerful beings in the universe of Dungeons and Dragons to bestow magical powers on them. What kind of person can actually do that?”
Hattem wouldn’t answer my pestering attempts to get him to divulge which particular “D&D” setting the game might be based in, but given its gothic atmosphere, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s related to Ravenloft, a plane ruled by an elder vampire.
The other game under the Wizards of the Coast brand, the Austin-based studio behind “Exodus,” made waves by conscripting another Austinian, Matthew McConaughey, to voice a key character. But the choice wasn’t just about star power.
“‘Exodus’ is a third-person action adventure, role-playing game built in a brand new science-fiction universe that we created,” said game writer Drew Karpyshyn, who also wrote for Mass Effect, a sci-fi series that “Exodus” is often compared to.
“We have a hard science-fiction basis where nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. The faster you travel, the closer you get to the speed of light, the slower time goes for you. But for everybody else, time continues at a normal rate.
“So you go on a journey, it might seem like five days. Ten days have passed, but years could have passed back home. So when you return, you find things are very different. This is a very powerful theme that’s explored in [the film] ‘Interstellar,’ and that’s one of Matthew McConaughey’s movies. So when we had a chance to work with Matthew, we presented to him our universe, our story, and he instantly understood this core element and the impact it could have on the kinds of stories we could tell.”
“Exodus” developers told me that this concept could lead to far-reaching changes between playthroughs, as the main character, Jun Aslan (yes, like the Narnian lion, I confirmed), goes on various journeys that result in generational changes for the surviving human populace.
But the one thing I may be most excited about? The “awakened” animal characters, which I’m told include a superintelligent octopus and at least one punchable bear in space armor (which the “Exodus” developers implied was a knowing homage to one of the most ridiculous cards in “Magic: The Gathering,” a game that Wizards of the Coast also owns).
From Jonathan Blow, an indie auteur famous for introspective puzzle games “Braid” and “The Witness,” “Order of the Sinking Star” is the culmination of a decade of work.
“In terms of some kind of objective measure of ‘how good is the puzzle design,’ this is the best thing I’ve ever worked on by a significant margin,” Blow said.
The game, which superficially resembles block-pushing “sokoban” games, boasts at least 1,000 discrete puzzles, all part of a mysterious story that Blow says would take hundreds of hours to fully unravel.
But Blow doesn’t see the game as a pure mechanical challenge. Rather, he hopes it can get players to engage with philosophical questions.
“If there’s a neat mechanic, is it just a gimmick, or are we undertaking some exploration about why that mechanic is interesting and how it’s surprising and how it could be beautiful?,” asked Blow. “Is there a way that you could understand our universe by playing around with the possible universes that you could have in games?”
I’m not sure that I have the intelligence or persistence to ace “Order of the Sinking Star,” but I admire Blow’s ambition and will certainly give it a try. While he’s enlisted other designers to help, his vision remains singularly unique in the games industry.
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James Perkins Mastromarino produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Todd Mundt. Perkins Mastromarino also produced it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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