Skbma: Snowfall writer on preserving cultural identity in games
Marie Dealessandri
Features Editor
Thursday 28th April 2022
Skábma: Snowfall from Finnish indie studio Red Stage Entertainment launched on Friday.
It is also the day we talked to the studio's co-founder and writer Marjaana Auranen, as well as Stanislas Jun Peyrat, lead product manager at PID Games, the publishing arm of Plug In Digital that's handling the game's launch.
And as you would expect from an interview done on launch day, it's a stressful and emotional time for the team. For Auranen, that's ten years of pondering over an idea finally coming together in one beautiful package.
Skábma tells the story of Áilu, a young Sámi reindeer herder, and her quest to restore the land around her. The game is rooted in Sámi history and culture, an Indigenous people from Northern Europe spanning four countries: Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Russia.
Skábma is fully voice-acted in one of the ten Sámi languages, Northern Sámi. It is the most spoken one, but as the title's website highlights, they are now all considered endangered languages.
"When you have these wounds in your identity, as an artist it means that you want to handle those through your art"
Marjaana Auranen
Auranen is Sámi herself and she describes wanting to make a game about her culture as an "urge" that she's had for a long time, and particularly having it fully voiced in Sámi.
"I think the language part is very important because my grandmother never passed on the language skills," she tells GamesIndustry.biz. "So I never learnt my mother tongue and I have learnt that now as an adult. So in my family [the language] is an issue that we are still trying to revive and tackle. That is one reason I wanted to have this game in one of the Sámi languages.
"And of course, when you
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