Log in member
Can a mostly inept squirrel detective solve why the chicken crossed the road? That's up for us to decide when No Stone Unturned comes our way. We chatted with the creator Gareth Owens at this year's Gamescom.
"Hello everyone, I'm Alex, I'm here at Gamescom, I've just been checking out No Stone Unturned, I'm here with Gareth. Gareth, you are one of the most interesting people I've chatted to at Gamescom so far, I hope you don't mind. That's the first thing someone said to me while I've been here, thank you. Because we got talking and we were talking about detective work and I'll ask you to do a bit of an elevator pitch on the game if you can, perhaps for people who might not already be aware, but then I'd really just like to dig into all of your heavy experience with detective mysteries and murder mystery and stuff like that."
"Yeah, so the game is No Stone Unturned, it is a comedy murder mystery that asks why did the chicken cross the road, but it asks it in a more serious way than most people ask it and in following the main quest of the chicken cross the road why, you will go over five other cases that sort of go into the smaller, more dark lives of the animals living inside this like quaint UK village. And yeah, that's the game, it's massively full of lots of different mini games so you constantly, while following the story, you won't know what's coming next in terms of what you're going to be challenged on, but it's not a puzzle game, you don't have to be intelligent or have to like know the right way to do it, it's a game that could be played by anybody, even if it's their first game and with that every mini game is very easy to learn without any instruction. I don't tutorialise, I just make it really simple and then I catch you if you fail so that you can come back and try again and things like that. So it's more of a natural holistic process of following the story than it is anything else. But to your point about my experience, I come from murder mystery is in my blood, you know, I've been doing it for a long long time, I started out at 12 years old so I lied about my age just to get on Facebook and I was like well why add one more year, why not add you know 20, yeah 23 years and it definitely helped me get work. So I was able from that to get into writing murder mystery and that was mostly because you know I loved it beforehand, my parents were both police detectives, they told me their stories growing up, they had Columbo and Jonathan Creek on TV, I was just constantly watching murder mystery, loving it and thinking god this is what I need to do one day and now I've gotten to a point where I've worked in escape room, I've worked in film and TV, I've worked on books, I've probably done over 200 stories across my career and I wanted to make my own story and start my journey and anybody who knows me closely will know my life goal is to be Agatha Christie. She was amazing and did a great job in this genre but the the world has moved on from her perspective on life and it is time for the modern view of the love of the craft because it is in so so many ways a part of my identity but also a part of like the national identity of the UK, like globally we are known for murder because of Jack the Ripper, Agatha, Arthur Conan Doyle before that. All the stuff that we did in a time that we probably shouldn't talk about you know a lot of colonial murders."
"I have no clue what you're talking about. No yeah so it's in many ways the next step evolutionarily to go into games because we've done books, we've seen film and TV like really do murder mystery nicely but the the thing that was always disconnecting was that you never figured it out.
You never got to actually do anything that made sense. It was just this genius, Sherlock, Poirot, they would go off and they would look at all the evidence and they would compute it like a genius and then tell you the answer later and I thought there's no fun in that. Why not have a character that is an absolute idiot but is still going to become the greatest detective in the world anyway and I think that that speaks to my view on life as well. I think that no matter who you are if you're willing to try hard enough and not willing to give up you can get something at least you know so yeah that's in many ways what No Stone is about and what the game is. It's constantly going to be adapting and shifting mechanics alongside the story so that you never know how you're going to be challenged but you know that there will be some kind of gentle challenge coming up soon and you can anticipate it. Could you talk to me a bit about Detective Cox sort of as a person and what other characters we'll be able to meet because as you've said before this isn't just a character that is in the game he's also in a comic book and he's going to have his own puppet with Jim Henson company which is very exciting. Talk to me about this detective and the multimedia that he's a part of. Yeah I'm amazed at how quickly he's taken people's interest because I thought he was very personal and very like niche in the sense of that I thought he's a lot like me in the sense that he's very confident he's running into something that he probably doesn't even understand how to deal with but yeah he runs in headfirst he loves the thrill of the search and the find and he wants to be the greatest detective in the world but he has no idea why he wakes up at the beginning of the game with amnesia the same way any good classic detective game begins but it's very much like oh I wonder what's going on he finds a detective badge and a hat and he's like oh I'm the greatest detective in the world obviously I must solve this and then he goes through clearly being a terrible detective and clearly being an absolute idiot but he gets there anyway and that's him is like this idea of relentlessness and wanting to get through but yeah as you say we started off with a comic book and that was really where you got to first see his style of just not listening to people and just running through and yeah now we're lucky enough to have like a collaboration in the works with Jim Henson company and I just loved the Muppets and Dark Crystal and everything else like that growing up it's an absolute bucket list thing to work with them and I'm so thrilled for it but yeah we're going to be producing a web series that will be coming out with a Detective Cox puppet interacting with the real development team of No Stone Unturned and he basically just gets in the way he's featuring your good self yeah I'll be featured but it'll be a cartoonized version of me I'm not quite sure exactly what path to take but I like Alex Horne from Taskmaster going the route of like making yourself the kicking stool you know so I like that kind of feeling I might go for that and then just have Detective Cox constantly beating me up or something like that but yeah that's where we're going with Henson and I'm very excited for it they are they're lovely people like as much as you'd expect but they are lovely people and they love what they do. We're short on time unfortunately could you tell me when we're going to see more of No Stone Unturned and where people can find out more about it? Yeah sure thing so we have a new comic book The Terrifying Truth About Magicians coming to Kickstarter early next year and then the game itself will come around mid next year probably we're still figuring that out depending on things and then our Jim Henson web show will come out before the game comes out so that'll be a nice little hype up to see to see it actually being worked on like there will be genuine work being done in the background of this like show and it will be the office but an actual office but that's the idea at least. Gareth thank you so much for your time. Thank you."
