![]() ![]() Prior to The Pathless, Nava worked on Giant Squid’s underwater adventure Abzu and the highly-immersive Journey at thatgamecompany, which he points out were smaller in scope, more linear in their storytelling and more structured in how they presented the narrative through the environment. “It’s very much letting you figure out where to go on your own,” Nava explains, “and that theme of being lost and finding your way is something we tried to align both the narrative and the player experience on.” With no quest map or logs available in the game, one of the themes it really hones in on is finding your own way in the world. “We invented a language that the characters speak, so no matter what language you are playing game in, you always get subtitles - it always feels like it’s from another place,” he says. Visually and narratively, Nava says that the game takes motifs and architectural elements from different cultures from all over the world, such as the Inca, Mayan and Aztec ruins, to create its own culture. “That’s the thing that I love about my favorite myths you hear stories from different cultures - the Aztecs, the Romans, the Greeks - and they all are so different in their motifs, but so universal in their themes.” “We wanted to create the experience of living a myth, so the events that you play are larger than life,” Nava continues, adding that a goal was to make the game feel foreign no matter what culture the player is from. “It’s that relationship that really defines the characters,” he says. Nava describes the Hunter character, who arrives on the island from a faraway place to combat a curse that many hunters have attempted before her, as “a master of archery and an incredible acrobat,” while the eagle lifts her through the air so she can go further. ![]() ![]() To learn more, The Hollywood Reporter called Giant Squid creative director Matt Nava, who shipped Journey with thatgamecompany in 2012 and started at Giant Squid the next year. The Pathless, from publisher Annapurna Interactive, is an immersive, mythical open-world adventure following a hunter and her eagle companion as they navigate a curse of darkness on the island. ![]() While this week has been dominated by the launches of the next-gen Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 consoles, independent games are likely to take center stage again next week when The Game Awards release the nominations for the best indie titles of 2020.Īmong the year’s biggest indie releases is The Pathless from developer Giant Squid, which was behind Game Awards and BAFTA nominated underwater adventure Abzu. To see this content please enable targeting cookies.The Independent Gamer is a curated roundup of news from indie gaming, landing here every other Friday. For now, this trailer is a beautiful evocative thing that lets me imagine that Abzû's exactly what I'd like it to be, which is the whole point of E3 really: Assuming my hopes that it's a lovely spot of exploring are correct, I'd like to state for the record that "walking simulator" can still apply to games where you swim. I have no idea what players will be doing in the game, other than being in water, but I'm quite keen to find out when it arrives in 2016. Essentially, ABZÛ is the ocean of wisdom. As such, the name ABZÛ references a concept from the oldest Mesopotamian mythology: it is the combination of two ancient words Ab, meaning ocean, and Zû, meaning to know. The game draws inspiration from a deep, innate story that we all carry in our collective subconscious, a universal origin myth that resonates across cultures. Just about everything we know about the game is contained within the following press blurb:ĪBZÛ will take players on an epic adventure into the depths of the ocean, where they will encounter majestic creatures and discover long lost secrets. It's not much to go on, but certainly is enough to pique my interest and fill our heads with fanciful dreams. (The same thing happened with Cuphead.) That may because we don't much at all about it, other than it's a gorgeous undersea game and that developers Giant Squid are lead by Matt Nava, who was previously art director of thatgamecompany's acclaimed console wander 'em ups Journey and Flower. We gushed a little about Abzû in our E3 chat yesterday but in our fawning, er, hadn't actually got around to posting about it yet. ![]()
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