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Sunset

Indie Calendar - Sunset

We talk to Tale of Tales about their war story.

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Belgian indie outfit Tale of Tales was founded back in 2002, and perhaps they're best known for the seminal 2009 release The Path, a game based on Little Red Riding Hood.

We reached out to co-founder Auriea Harvey, to learn more about their next game, Sunset, a title that found success on Kickstarter last summer and is targeted for release in March next year ("or April or something like that").

"Sunset is a narrative-focussed game, it's in first-person, where the player is making decisions that are influencing the story in subtle but meaningful ways," explained Harvey during our chat over Skype.

"The player is playing a civilian who is experiencing the effects of war on the city where she lives. You're in a fictional South American city in 1972, right, and you're playing a housekeeper named Angela Burns, and every week an hour before sunset - the name of the game - you're visiting this bachelor pad of a very rich guy named Gabriel, and given tasks to do, but you're going through his stuff, you're exploring his house, you're finding out that he's a very important man, all this sort of stuff. And it turns out that all the things you're doing in this world, your relationship which is developing with the guy that owns this apartment, is actually affecting the war that is happening outside. As you get to know him better, you're sucked into a rebellious plot and a lot of other crazy things happen."

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"It's a game that has a strong story. A story that's tense and surprising. Violence is the backdrop, but we didn't want to tell a hero's story, it's more about someone who's simply living in a time of conflict, and telling things from their perspective. The anger that the character feels is reflected in the tension in the world outside, you might say, but ultimately it's about the world that we're living in now I guess, but maybe in a more fun way. I mean, who doesn't get angry at the way that war is all around us today, and the way you feel it? But everyone's life is all about getting on with things. So I guess the game is just bringing to the forefront that even the little things you do and the relationships you have can have an affect on the bigger picture."

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Much like The Path, Sunset is a game that is very focussed in its execution. This time, however, rather than a path (and what surrounds it), the game is located inside one single location.

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"The whole game takes place in one apartment, it's a very beautiful apartment that undergoes a lot of transformation as the war goes on," says Harvey. "So basically you are just in the apartment and doing things that this guy is telling you to do, but then at a certain point things shift, and while you're still just making the same choices - it's almost binary, like will you do this or that? - the affect that this ultimately ends up having on the world is what you as a player have to deal with."

"You'll see the world change around you. For example, there's a large window overlooking the town, where you have this huge vista outside, and, for example, one day you see smoke off in the distance, the next day you notice that something's on fire in town, another day a building might collapse."

"Also the guy who owns the apartment - Gabriel Ortega - leaves you notes, and is sort of going through an emotional time. And even though you never meet him you're privy to his mood about what's going on in the world, and he's sort of involved with the government. The story is about this relationship that you're having with this person, and what he's feeling and what his decisions are that he's making."

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Tale of Tales may be considered among the elders of the narrative and art-focussed indie game field, but where does Sunset land in the ever growing landscape of independent games?

"It's kind of in the same vein as games like Gone Home or something like that, but the difference being that the things that you do in the world really have an affect in the game as opposed to it just covering a story," says Harvey. "While the story doesn't branch much it's more about that affect, the way you feel about the world, in the game world. In that sense it's meant to be a bit of a thriller, like watching one of these movies where you don't know what's going to happen next, and you really want to know. "

Perhaps most interesting was the genesis of the concept, the inspiration that shaped the ideas that would eventually form the game.

"We were looking at all these war games, Call of Duty and whatnot, and while we were playing them we were like "this is interesting" but we always wanted to know what's the game like from the other perspective."

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"I guess the whole genesis of the thing was when we were playing Half-Life 2 a long time ago, and we saw these like, you know at the beginning and there's two people sitting on this couch huddled together, and you're going through as Gordon Freeman shooting stuff. And we wondered what's the game like from their perspective. What's that like?"

"And then just feeling like that this is kind of the way our lives are; you hear about wars very far away... and we wanted to tell that kind of story, we wanted to show that our lives are not meaningless in all of this, that we're also a part of all this. I don't want to get to deep about this, because it's still just a game, quote unquote. But that's kind of where it came from, playing war games, and wondering about the other side."

In a way, it sounds a bit like another recent title, 11 bit Studios' This War Of Mine (a game that was mentioned during our chat), with a similar subject matter that's told through a very different style of game.

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So what does the future hold for Tale of Tales? We asked about the hopes and aspirations of the studio looking ahead into 2015.

"With Tale of Tales, what we're trying to do right now, I mean what we feel right now, is we've existed for ten years, we've made a lot of creative experiments within games," says Harvey. "We've tried out a lot of ideas and some of them worked and resonated with people, and some of them didn't. But now we want to take that knowledge and experience that we've had and make a game that's really going to resonate with a lot of people. Especially people who are fans of first-person narrative games, people who like strong stories in games. We want to make a game that a lot of people can get behind and get something from, so no matter what your background is or experience level is with the genre. We feel like we're ready to take on that challenge and the industry, the wider industry, seems supportive of that right now. It's an interesting time to be making video games of this sort."

"We're really hoping to have the game out in the spring of next year, March, April, something like that. I think beyond that there's a lot of projects that we've been working on. It's really hard to think of anything, mostly we just think about finishing the game and going on vacation."

"Mostly, right now, we want to know what's going to happen with this game, we get it out, and what's going to be the reaction? And so we're squarely focussed on Sunset. In a way we feel like it's the biggest game of our career - it feels funny to say that. It's definitely the most important for us, and we can't wait for it to be out there and people to enjoy it."

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