What Remains Of Edith Finch is a deeply depressing collection of interactive tiny stories about the tiny, tragic lives of a cursed family living in a monstrous treehouse. It’s also a great display of experimentation, switching genres from story to story – one moment you’re a playable bestiary while shuffling, the next you’re cutting down fish in a cannery while the workbench disappears beneath your scrolling dreams. The developer’s next project seems to strive for a similar balance of fantasy and darkness. This is another anthology in which you play a field biologist investigating the “strangeness of organic life.” And chicken houses.
While the project hasn’t been formally announced yet, Giant Sparrow founder and director Ian Dallas shared some information with the team about its intricate workings. New York Times. There is also some information about developer blog – the URL suggests the project’s working title is “Heron” – according to which Giant Sparrow “draws inspiration from the nature documentaries Ico, Windosill, Spirited Away and David Attenborough, as well as the spirit of early animators such as Winsor McCay and Walt Disney , which used (for the time) cutting-edge technology to build something that didn’t feel technical at all, but instead felt strangely alive.
If the project draws inspiration from nature documentaries, it also draws inspiration from Dallas’ disenchantment with nature films. He finds them often rather broad and superficial, with too much dissection between creatures and places. “They work in part because they are a distraction for a young child,” he told the NYT. Be careful, Dallas. I hear David Attenborough has a tender left hook for a guy his age.
Giant Sparrow’s designers also found the nature film premise to be a glass ceiling, resulting in lukewarm concepts “like a photography mini-game or collecting 10 ladybugs or whatever.” Hence, in part, the planned introduction of more fantastic creatures that can provide the basis for more intricate approaches. Judging by the concept art from the NYT article, the menagerie now ranges from regular chickens (complete with a pooping function) to chickens that have been mistaken for mobile homes. “When we started adding some slightly goofy elements that took us to weirder and more interesting places,” Dallas continued.
That said, our goal is simply to “show how weird biology is” and encourage you to reflect on “how many weird things are happening around us all the time,” rather than making up fairy tales.
They also strive to create a more “exploratory and fun” world, with Dallas commenting that “single-player games often resemble a chessboard – a world highly predictable and entirely designed to facilitate the limited set of actions a player can take with.” Here’s an example of a scenario from the game, which is a work in progress: trying to get the giraffe to come up and lower its head at the right angle so that something can be placed on it.
There’s an element of horror to this, which intensified as the High Sparrow studied the various creatures and realized how bizarre, say, a butterfly’s reproductive cycle is by the standards of smelly, non-holometabolous human beings. “We slowly found our way to a game where animals feel gross and maybe you feel that visceral reaction, like when a caterpillar runs across your finger. There’s something about all those moving legs that’s really disturbing, but also fascinating,” Dallas said.
In tiny, the fresh Giant Sparrow game is a real mix of emotions, and I personally like such emotions. Going beyond the constraints of the nature documentary format, I’d like to know if the creators thought about how their knowledge and design experience might have structured their ideas about non-human creatures in advance.
I’m also interested in whether the animals in the game are portrayed as passive, with the player making choices that progress in the simulation, and whether there will be any exploration of biology as a knowledge-producing discipline. I have many questions, yes.
Plus, I’m definitely getting a Jeff Vandermeer/New Weird vibe to this whole thing. It sounds a bit like an exclusive version of the recent Zoochozy, in which it is best to avoid being around giraffes. By the way, if your first thought when you saw a chicken coop was “I want one”, maybe check out Reka.
