Prideful Sloth on making "games with heart"
Stardew Valley is often credited for kickstarting an entire movement of wholesome games that truly exploded with Animal Crossing: New Horizons' release in 2020. While the cosy trend feels recent, there were lots of developers working on non-violent games before then.
Prideful Sloth is one of them.
Founded in 2015, the Brisbane-based studio focuses on explorative, cosy titles, including the successful Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles, released in 2017, and more recently Grow: Song of the Evertree. Launched in 2021, the title sold 120,000 copies in a few months.
The developer was co-founded by Joel Styles and Cheryl Vance, soon joined by John Northwood. A programmer by trade, he became director at Prideful Sloth in 2016, having previously spent a decade at the likes of Sega, Rocksteady, and Kixeye.
The team describe themselves as a "micro-AAA studio," as it was built on the idea of taking their collective AAA experience and applying it to a different kind of game as a different kind of developer.
"Games with heart is probably the description – we were heavily inspired by Nintendo, Harvest Moon, these kinds of games," Northwood tells us. "We were there before it was cool, we didn't know what it was! If [only] we'd used that word, 'wholesome'," he laughs.
"We had no idea what we were making, it was just: there's no combat. People were like 'What's your game? Why is there no combat?' Cheryl, the designer, is very much in that space and loves it and, as a team, it's refreshing."
When asked whether Prideful Sloth has seen an 'Animal Crossing effect' following New Horizons' impressive success boosted by the pandemic, Northwood says he thinks so, adding that this space is "definitely growing" and that COVID was a
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