WP: Some investigation-based games are guilty of too much hand-holding to the extent where it’s impossible to fail. How much assistance will players have? Is it possible to miss clues?

We created a story-driven game, so we can’t trap the player and leave them stuck. We acknowledge their choices as they can personalise the character through skills. The information they can get will differ according to his success and failures.

WP: Apart from the investigation components, what other gameplay elements can we expect?

Investigation is not really a gameplay element of its own. It’s a combination of exploring, speaking with people, and using the character’s skills (to find more clues and better understand them or to persuade people to lend a hand, for example). That being said, there will be encounters with creatures of the mythos and their human servants. These phases will lead to survival phases, where the player has to progress while remaining unseen, or where they have to find a way to repel something or to escape from the materialisation of Pierce’s own madness.

WP: Despite Pierce being a war veteran you’ve chosen not to include combat in the game. Why is that?

The cosmic horror invented by Lovecraft shows that humans are mere ants in front of the mythos. Just knowing these things exist is unbearable for someone’s mind. We wanted to translate this concept, which is why we did not want any combat mechanic at the core of the experience.

This game will not allow the player to fight back the creatures of the mythos with sheer violence. It’s not like you can get rid of an Old One by shooting him in the face.

WP: Can Pierce be attacked and killed by the horrors that lurk on Darkwater Island?

Of course – but that’s not the worst of it.

WP: Tell us about the game’s world. Is it an open world in the sense that if a player misses clues at an earlier area, they can players backtrack and search for missed clues? Or is the game on a fairly linear path?

The player will progress linearly from chapter to chapter. Some chapters are very open, presenting various methods that the player can exploit to achieve Pierce’s goal, depending on exploration and the level of skills to find hidden things, clues and passages. It might also depend on how the player manages to talk to locals, and the level of Pierce’s skills to persuade, intimidate, or understand things thanks to psychology. While other chapters are more linear as they are more focused on a very story-driven experience, or a survival phase than on an investigation phase.

We tried to make it so the game experience would shift from phase to phase regularly so the player never has a feeling of repetition.