Little Nightmares

After eight years working on LittleBigPlanet, Tarsier is exchanging dreams for nightmares

Tarsier’s brightly coloured, playfully decorated premises are exactly what you’d expect the home of a studio that’s spent the past eight years working closely with Media Molecule, on its LittleBigPlanet series, to look like. A hotchpotch of lampshades and rugs, a familial collection of framed photos of the team, and a range of stately looking furniture – we’re given the rundown of which chairs are the most comfy during our tour – make the space feel welcoming and homely. There’s fresh fruit in the kitchen, naturally, and not a single employee appears to be wearing shoes. Underneath this small company’s friendly exterior, however, something darker has been fermenting, waiting for an opportunity to bubble to the surface.

Vampyr

Dontnod’s first open-world game is more Dishonored than Dracula

Among the things we disliked about our first glimpse of Vampyr, Dontnod’s tale of occult predation in wartime London, was its combat – a graceless third-person mishmash of three-hit combos and pistol exchanges, peppered with crowdcontrol spells and teleport dashes. It was a shaky advert for a developer now wandering back into action-adventure territory after the success of episodic adventure Life Is Strange, but the addition of Teppei Takehana to Dontnod’s ranks goes some way towards addressing our misgivings. Hired as animation director in June 2016, he brings ten years of experience as an animator at Kojima Productions and Quantic Dream, whose games tread a similar line between motioncaptured plausibility and outright fantasy. While Dontnod doesn’t have any new combat footage to show during our visit to the studio’s Parisian HQ, Takehana’s matter-offactness is reassuring. “To make a responsive action game is really easy,” he notes. “To have a responsive action game that looks realistic is more difficult. This is our challenge.”

Prey

Arkane Austin is crafting a sci-fi yarn that wants to say yes

Hanging on the walls of Arkane Austin’s studio are reminders of Prey’s core design tenets. Styled like motivational posters, each features a game, and details the laudable qualities Arkane intends to learn from it. One, titled ‘Say yes to the player’, shows Just Cause 2’s Rico straddling an airliner. “It’s an instinct we try to cultivate, which is an instinct almost any gamer has anyway,” Ricardo Bare, lead designer on Prey, tells us. “When you’re playing a game and you hit an obstacle, you’re just naturally like, ‘I’m gonna try this, I’m gonna try this,’ and we try to, as developers, remember that instinct and say yes to it.”