Why Are We Making This Game (That we can’t mention the name of)?

That’s a good question. Thanks for asking. Well it all started twenty years ago…

No I’m kidding, I never even thought about making games until a few years ago. And this game was largely thought up when I played a little game called Pentiment in 2022. You may or may not have heard of it. It’s a relatively small game from the relatively big studio of Obsidian Entertainment.

I don’t really like point and click games normally, as although I’m a huge fan of games that are narratively focused, I normally want something more complicated from gameplay than the typical ‘walking around and trying to click on the right things’ that a lot of point and click games are based around.

However, I wanted to try Pentiment as I’ve been a huge fan of everything else Obsidian Entertainment has made, and I was pleasantly surprised. What really struck me and kept me engaged in the game, was the inclusion of simple minigames. Often these could be as easy as rotating a horseshoe for the blacksmith to hammer, but the minigames never outstayed their welcome and broke up the experience in a nice way so it wasn’t one long chain of running around and talking to people.

Playing Pentiment got me thinking that perhaps there’s more room to create RPG-Lite’s, if I can call them that, where the central gameplay loop is not based around getting past danger (through either stealth, fighting or persuasion), but rather minigame challenges where solving puzzles in different ways has narrative consequences.

This has been the foundational idea behind our upcoming game, and we’re going a step further with our minigames to really make them feel deep enough to the point that they could be standalone, albeit very small, games.

I’ll leave you with a screenshot of our very first minigame that we’ve completed for our demo, and if Pentiment sounded interesting at all to you, please go check it out here. It really is a great game.

Sincerely,

Gabe