Blanc Is an Empathetic Co-op Adventure Story Told Without a Single Word

ign.com:

If any It Takes Two fans didn’t watch the recent Nintendo Direct Mini late last month, then they may have slept on the wrong presentation. Tucked cozily into the show was Blanc, a visually striking story about a lost fawn and wolf cub that is, gloriously, a rare cooperative adventure.

Games that focus on couch or online co-op (Blanc has both) as a key gameplay element rather than just an optional addendum to an otherwise single-player experience are scarce despite the popularity of It Takes Two and its Hazelight predecessors, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons and A Way Out.

So it’s perhaps understandable that Blanc didn’t originate from a known games studio or even from a studio committed explicitly to making games at all. Instead, it’s the work of French agency Casus Ludi, a small company that explicitly designs interactive experiences, including interactive documentaries, board games, and other types of media.

Prior to Blanc, Casus Ludi had never made a large video game before, though several of its members had worked on small games. Its CEO, Florent de Grissac, had been a part of organizing multiple game jams in France when he was invited to participate in a 2018 jam in Québec City. De Grissac assembled a team of six, which included designer Rémi Gourrierec and artist Raphaël Beuchot, and headed to Québec City only to find themselves making a game while a massive snow storm raged outside.

The theme of the game jam? Perfect storm.

The snowscape outside inspired de Grissac and his colleagues to answer the question of what happens when a storm is over, and their respective answers turned into Blanc: a cooperative adventure starring a wolf cub and a deer fawn who become lost in a storm and must work together to reunite with their