Pax East Indie Interviews

 

 

 

I caught up with Dave Gilbert, President and CCO of Wadjeteye Games Sunday morning as PAX winded down. I first discovered the studio last fall when covering the Boston Festival of Indie Games and am steadily working my way through their back catalog. The New York City based studio is small but prolific and focuses on point and click adventures with compelling characters and stories.

 

Gilbert and his wife Janet, co-designer and CTO, both create their own games and help publish and produce others. One of their own better known creations is the Blackwell series. There are four games in the series (and a new one in development slated for later this year) which follow protagonist Rosa Blackwell through solving crimes and understanding her unique link to the dead.  

 

 

Gilbert was a panelist of the Want a Good Story in Your Game? Get an Indie! panel at PAX where he discussed some of his early lessons in adventure game design. In the first Blackwell game, there’s a puzzle where Rosa comes off as overly antisocial which makes the puzzle solution difficult as players cannot understand why she refuses to perform the obvious easy answer. This was a good lesson in staying true to character traits versus game design. They seem to have found the right balance in later games.

 

To date, I played through Blackwell Deception and Resonance and would recommend both (Blackwell over Resonance if you make me choose). Their latest title, Gemini Rue, was just ported for iOS and is available now in the App Store.

 

 

In a case of awesome PR people I actually happened upon Phoenix Online when Wadjeteye’s PR, who knew I liked adventure games, suggested I get in touch with Phoenix's Designer and PR Director, Katie Hallahan.

 

Phoenix Online is virtual studio (i.e. their employees and volunteers are spread out all over the country with no actual office) that grew out of a fan project to bring back King’s Quest. Through hard work and prevailing over legal battles, the team brought the Silver Lining to the world. The non-commercial episodic adventure game brings us back to Daventry to follow King Graham and help him unravel the curse plaguing his family. Having been a huge Sierra fan I’m not sure how I missed out on the existence of this!

 

 

Phoenix has other Sierra connections as well. Jane Jensen of Gabriel Knight fame consults for them. They are currently helping with Moebius, her new game due out this summer. Her daughter, Raleigh Holmes, is the title character voice actor in Phoenix's commercial game Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller.  

 

Before PAX I played through the first episode of Cognition and really enjoyed it. The story is set in Boston and while Holmes’ voice acting isn’t bad, Boston is a tough accent to fake (especially to a local). Hallahan is actually Boston based so I gave her a hard time during our interview! She assured me she consulted for the recording sessions after the first episode so Erica’s accent should get more consistent through the later games. I just started episode two so I will see about that.

 

 

At PAX they were showcasing the first few areas of soon to be released Episode 3. There were a few spoilers for Episode 2 but it looked like the next installment was coming together nicely. The episodic series follows FBI agent Erica Reed who is out to solve the serial murder of her brother as well as other violent crimes. She has a special clairvoyance (or “cognition”) that helps her investigate crime scenes. I would much rather spend my evenings clicking my way through this crime drama than watch yet another installment of CSISVU or whatever the heck network TV shows these days...

 

 

Tiffany, our Editor-in-Chief, and I met with the Revolution 60 team on the busy expo hall floor. They featured a touch driven game aimed at teenage girls. I am somewhat anti-touch games though now that I have a phablet I’m kinda coming around. The graphics looked pretty cool and it’s developed on the Unreal engine with full dialog voice action. If it ever makes it to Android or Windows I’d pick it up.

 

The gameplay reminded me of the old Dragon’s Lair games where its story driven with quick actions required between scenes. Thankfully, its not quite as much of a quarter muncher and the levels weren’t too bad. I made it through the first four or five actions pretty easily but then had trouble tracing a proper square fast and precise enough. I eventually made it through the demo wishing I could see more of the story.

 

 

Revolution 60 described their game concept as mixing Mass Effect and Heavy Rain. They explained the choices you make throughout the game will directly affect its outcome. The demo wasn’t long enough to really get a glimpse into that but the story was compelling and drew me in even with the chaos of the expo floor competing for my attention.

 

I am all for getting more teenage girls into gaming and I do think the story and gameplay could hit that target audience. The character design, even with an almost exclusively female team at the studio, still seemed targeted a little more towards teenage boys to me. The team explained that characters were toned down from original concept art but they still seemed a little bit overly Barbie-waisted to me. Not a deal breaker but I kinda wanted to give all the characters a sandwich...

 

 

The moral of the story? All of these studios are worth checking out. And next year I will take some days off post PAX if I plan to do anymore “journalism.”