Wireframe – Issue 20, 2019

12 / wfmag.cc

 Not pictured:

Rocket Raccoon.

Less Police Squad, more Chinatown... but with chickens

t might look like your traditional wacky

internet nonsense, but Chicken Police

• by developer The Wild Gentlemen’s
  admission – is best described as
  ‘Orwellian buddy cop animal noir’.
  This might be a game featuring a couple of
  chickens as – surprise – police officers, but
  there’s also a dark, satirical story behind it all.
  What do you do as the rooster cops?
  Detective work, of course, with point-and-click
  mechanics joining elements from visual novels –
  and a bit more sprinkled on top that the studio’s
  keeping close to its chest for now. But by far the
  most striking aspect of Chicken Police is its visual
  style, mixing classic forties film noir with a cut-
  out collage look straight from the pages of Farm
  Animals Weekly (not a real magazine).
  “We use the animal characteristics of the
  game largely the same way Orwell’s Animal Farm
  did,” explains Peter Nadas, co-founder of The
  Wild Gentlemen. “While not all our characters
  are purely there for satirical reasons, the world
  of the game, which we call The Wilderness, is.”
  Though Nadas isn’t forthcoming as to how

or what Chicken Police satirises, the general

overview sees players looking after rooster cop

partners, Sonny and Marty. The duo was once

known all around Clawville – as, Nadas says,

“celebrity cops, real local heroes” – but the story

takes place a decade down the line, with each

character radically different from the cop – and

chicken – they were before. “Chicken Police

intentionally confronts its hard-boiled story and

design with its absurd humour to create the

same ambivalence our heroes encountered

during their careers,” Nadas says.

Roosters and cats and foxes might lead you

down the path of thinking this is a game for

kids, but those who’ve been paying attention

to the words used previously like ‘gritty’ and

so on won’t be surprised to hear it’s not the

case. “While our story is intended for an adult

audience, the absurdity of our characters

creates a strong dissonance,” Nadas says.

“That’s what makes the animal characters, the

comical title, but even the intentionally limited

use of colours, so important. The contrast/

dissonance itself is a deliberate design decision

which the game itself completes and will partially

resolve. The ambivalent environment and this

sharp contrast are both main strengths of the

game, and the world we’ve built around it.”

This unique approach came about partly

thanks to one of the studio’s founding members

funding development to get the game to a

saleable point. The team has been working on

it as a game since “somewhere between 2014

and 2015” with the original idea actually popping

up as an idea from Chicken Police’s writer,

Balint Bank Varga, who envisioned the project as

Chicken Police

I

GENRE

Noir adventure

(with chickens)

FORMAT

PC

DEVELOPER

The Wild Gentlemen

PUBLISHER

The Wild Gentlemen

RELEASE

TBC 2020

Info

12 / wfmag.cc

Early Access

Attract Mode

 Characters are all animal

heads and human bodies.