Vi fick chansen att snacka med designern och writern Thomas Mahler från Moon Studios som just nu arbetar med det lovande Xbox One-exklusiva Ghibli-inspirerade metroidvania-äventyret Ori and the Blind Forest. Han berättade bland annat vad grundupplägget är i denna originella titel:
"You play Ori who's a forest spirit. And he's on this journey of self exploration and he has to find more about himself. It's a bit of a coming of age story. It's definitely inspired by Disney films. But I don't want to give too much away today."
Mahler berättar även om deras milt sagt originella upplägg för studion som är utspridd över hela jorden, samt om inspirationskällorna:
"We are a virtual studio. We have people all around the world. We just basically picked the right people for the jobs. We have people in Australia, in America, all over Europe, and so on, to just come together to make this game.
We grew up playing games like A Link to the Past, Super Metroid, and it always bugged me that we never really have games anymore where I felt the same kind of feeling as I did as a child when I played these games. So that's what we wanted to recreate. The idea was can we give people that feeling again? And hopefully we succeeded in that."
Enligt Mahler är det svårare än man tror att göra en riktigt väl sammansatt metroidvania-värld, men han menar att Moon Studios har lyckats:
"When it comes to a metroidvania, it's extremely difficult to design a real metroidvania. There has been a lot of games recently that have been fairly linear, then slap a map on top of it and call it a metroidvania. And that's not really doing the job. We've been designing [it] from the ground up to become one of those games where everything is connected. There's no loading time in the game ever."
Allt detta och mycket annat spännande i nedanstående mastiga intervju om ett av den senaste tidens mest intressanta nyutannonserade spel.
