The grotesque and surreal Murasaki Baby

A few minutes removed from the busy Gamescom showfloor we caught up with Ovosonico's Massimo Guarini, to talk about the innovative PS Vita title that was revealed during the Sony press conference in Cologne.

Guarini who sports a long career having worked on some of the early Tom Clancy titles from Red Storm Entertainment as well as serving as director on Naruto: Rise of a Ninja at Ubisoft Montreal before moving to Japan where he among other things directed Shadows of the Damned at Grasshopper Manufacture. Returning to his native Italy Guarini founded Ovosonico whose first project is Murasaki Baby.

"I got the idea for Murasaki Baby on a business trip I had back in the times and I was riding a train and I saw this little girl with a heart-shaped balloon in her hands. So it's really taken from a real life scene, not from movies or other things. And I thought it'd be so cool and emotionally powerful to actually be able to grab her hand on a touchscreen and lead her through an imaginary world. And that's where the idea popped in and when I also came up with the idea to switch the backgrounds the PS Vita was the best fit for me."

"I really wanted to be organic with the artstyle. I do like contrast very much and that's probably why you have a sort of black and white foreground and the highly saturated colour background. But it also serves a little bit of gameplay mechanic, which is actually switching the backgrounds which in the game is called changing the mood and scene. So we really need to separate visually the foreground from the background. And it's also a way to change the colour of the game if you get bored by a single colour all the time."

Guarini admits to enjoying disturbing or grotesque artstyles and named Tim Burton's early work as a source of inspiration along with German expressionism from the 1930's.

"It's a grotesque and surreal combination of imagery and that fits perfectly with the nightmarish world of children in my opinion. I was kind of a secluded, lonely kid when I was young and I used to have imaginary trips into my inner world and that's something... a memory I really cherish."

The conversation then turned towards the narrative approach and storytelling.

"Lately there's a sort of trend in gaming to impose storylines and narrative over players saying "you have to be sad now, laugh now, you have to be scared now". It's just doesn't work for me. I think that's not the correct way to use our medium. We're not movies. You cannot really have a script for games. You have to use your own dictionary and in that sense our own dictionary is the game mechanics, the gameplay, the interaction, right? I really want to make this experiment and come up with gameplay mechanics that can also trigger emotion. Actual real emotions into human beings, and not just gamers, right. And that's how users will be playing Murasaki Baby and that's how it merges with the silent storytelling concept. Meaning, yes there is a story, there is a meaning. There are other characters as well in the game. But no I'm not going to tell you anything. I'm not going to be imposing anything on you."

Speaking of the importance of leaving the interpretation up to players Guarini added:

"Triggering their own imagination. It's like back in the time when we were playing Pitfall - it was just a bunch of pixels over there - but in your mind you were the greatest adventurer of all time. And you were actually jumping big holes with crocodiles inside. But it was just a bunch of pixels, you were filling the gaps by yourself. We have no such constraints anymore in terms of graphics, but we have constraints in terms of emotional... you know, ability to talk with people I think in games. So you are going to fill the gaps in that regard, but ironically I think that as a director you're more in control of the game if you act like that, rather than having a script from a Hollywood writer or whatever."

Murasaki Baby will see release on PS Vita next year and Ovosonico are also working on a second new game that is currently in pre-production.