The creators of What Remains Of Edith Finch are making a weird and alarming biology game inspired by Ghibli and Attenborough
What Remains Of Edith Finch is a very upsetting collection of interactive short stories, all devoted to the tragically short lives of a cursed family who live in a monstrous treehouse. It's also a wonderful show of experimentation, switching genres from story to story - one minute you're a playable bestiary on shuffle, the next you're beheading fish in a cannery as the worktable disappears beneath your scrolling daydreams. The developer's next project seems to be pursuing a similar balance of whimsy and darkness. It's another anthology experience, which casts you as a field biologist studying "the strangeness of organic life". Also, chicken-legged houses.
While the project has yet to be formally announced, Giant Sparrow's founder and director Ian Dallas has shared a little about its wiggly inner workings with the New York Times. There's also a smidgeon of info on the developer's blog - the URL suggests the project's working title is "Heron" - according to which Giant Sparrow are "drawing inspiration from places like Ico, Windosill, Spirited Away, and David Attenborough nature documentaries, along with the spirit of early animators like Winsor McCay and Walt Disney who used (for the time) cutting edge technology to build something that didn't feel technical at all but instead felt weirdly alive."
If the project takes inspiration from nature documentaries, it also takes inspiration from Dallas's disappointment about nature documentaries. He feels they're often rather broad and superficial, with too much cutting between creatures and places. "They work in part because it's like a distraction for a toddler," he told the NYT. Careful, Dallas, I hear David Attenborough's got a mean left hook for a guy his age.
Giant Sparrow's designers have also found the nature documentary premise to be a bit of a glass ceiling, resulting in lukewarm concepts "like a photographing mini game, or like collecting 10 ladybugs or whatever." Hence, in part, the planned introduction of
Read more on rockpapershotgun.com
