In that way, having Steven Universe composers Aivi and Surasshu involved in the project is a full circle moment for Tan. It’s PG.’ I want to present players with these moments that might frighten them a bit and encourage them to find their bravery and keep going.” That’s like, ‘Okay, maybe it’s not a G-game anymore. “Celebrating everything that’s good in life also presenting you with the scary world, like the goo-tunnel scene in the trailer, where the shadows collapse around you. People who are endearingly genuine like Rebecca Sugar, Lin-Manuel Miranda, just random creators in media, those people are big inspirations to me and the type of message I want to carry in my work.” “Just these stories that encourage bravery and inspire bravery in the face of a world that’s getting increasingly cynical and dark and edgy. Thinking they wouldn’t reply, he reached out with an email that read, “Hey, here’s my game. “Movies like Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke are scary and they’re quite violent sometimes, and they’re even quite dark, but if you look at the core of all these movies, there’s a spirit of joy and optimism and the human spirit.” “I’m really inspired by anything that’s profoundly optimistic and joyous,” he says. As seen in the E3 trailer, the world is populated by giant mysterious cats, shadowy figures, packs of wolves and relics of a lost human civilisation, all motifs in many of his favourite films, games and shows growing up. Tan’s love for the beautiful flora and fauna of the worlds of Studio Ghibli and joyous stories of Rebecca Sugar and Lin-Manuel Miranda oozes out of Way to the Woods’ visual and aural design. A Sprinkle Of Studio Ghibli, Journey, Steven Universe And Everything Nice While Tan didn’t want to go too deep into the game and spoil the experience, some of those gameplay opportunities he described to me included smashing into vending machines and glass scavenging food for you and your fawn, using your magical antler powers to gather specks of light and reactivate broken down machines.įor those worried about the deer’s survival, Tan revealed you should expect a story that’s more Kiki’s Delivery Service than Grave of the Fireflies. We know what deer do, but what does a deer do in a mall?” Whereas in a forest it’s like, ‘That’s a deer in a forest’, we know that. Then, as I started to think about it more, it presented so much gameplay opportunities.
It gave me a way to present these environments that I just thought would visually be really cool to have an animal in. “That’s a lot of the roots of the post-apocalypse idea. Our everyday things like bins or vending machines are these crazy, fantastical, god-machines to these animals because they just have no idea how it works.” I want to take present, really, average environments that we might take for granted like a train station or a mall, and just kind of twist it and present it in a way that it’s being worshipped. This pot was like some kind of ancient ritual pot’, whereas to them it’s just a pot. So, I had a much more limited scope and gameplay but that allowed me to explore it more in depth.”įrom this, Tan looked to how we see ancient civilisations and view those society’s everyday objects as significant cultural relics with a greater meaning than they were initially intended to, to predict how a deer would see our world if it were nothing but a relic of the past. “I can’t have the player hold things sufficiently ,” he adds. How can I remind people of the other life on the planet aside from people? In a zombie movie, what is a bird doing? What is a deer doing? It’s interesting to me.”
“What can I do as a deer? What emotions can I make people feel as a deer? What kind of story can I tell with a non-verbal character. Post-apocalyptic stories like The Walking Dead and The Last of Us often only show the human experiences of a desolate wasteland, so Tan wanted to use an animal perspective, one that would present interesting challenges in gameplay. But why deer? Tan answers, “because they’re really cute.” In Way to the Woods, you’ll explore the journey of a deer and fawn in an abandoned world as they try to make their way home.