Interview: How French Dev Ikimasho Is Adapting Korea's Signature Sights and Sounds for PSVR2's Tiger Blade | Push Square

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With its high-octane arcade gameplay and strong Korean influences, Tiger Blade caught our attention when it was announced for PSVR2 recently. In development at Parisian outfit Ikimasho, the game sees you slashing and blasting your way through waves of hoodlums as you're tasked with stealing a mysterious package containing a mythical tiger cub believed extinct for hundreds of years. We were eager to learn a little more about the project, including its exciting K-hip-hop soundtrack, so we caught up with co-founder Yann Suquet and CTO Chérif Younis to learn a little more about its influences, its night-time research trips across Seoul, and the musicians it’s collaborating with.

You're a Parisian studio, so what did you find appealing about Korea and specifically its style of cinema that made you want to design Tiger Blade around it?

Yann Suquet: The ambience of Korean neo-noir cinema is incredibly powerful. The combination of physical brutality — in sword and gun fights — with the darkness of its stories of treason and revenge are what we love about it. Some of our main inspirations were A Bittersweet Life, Man on High Heels, The Villainess, A Man from Nowhere, and My Name.

At Ikimasho, we make action games and pay particular attention to the immersion of the setting, so creating an homage to that genre was irresistible to us.

You say that Tiger Blade's setting has been meticulously recreated. Can you talk a little bit about what kind of research went into making the locations look and feel real?

Suquet: Tiger Blade delivers an original story in a fictional setting that heavily draws from Korea. It looks the part, but the rules are different, seen through the lens of the game's creative impetus. To render the immersion as