067Forget sword and shield, a true knight isn’t afraid to
get their hands dirty – fists-and-knuckles-style.
Your duty is to ascend The Tower, a mysterious
place where each floor consists of stolen land. This
means each one you take on looks a little different,
and once there you solve puzzles and fight enemies
with your gauntleted mitts. Despite the retro RPG
looks, combat happens in real-time. You’ll need your
wits about you to dodge, counter, and use
specialities to bring the knightly smackdown.
The first Cat Quest saw your heroic moggy saving
Felingard from a dragon problem. Sprinkled around
the cat kingdom was some lore about a
neighbouring country of dogs. In Cat Quest 2 more
is revealed, as war is brewing between Felingard
and the Lupus Empire. Adding co-op to the RPG-light
hack-and-slash, two players seek to bring peace to
the countries that are on the brink of war – an
unlikely pairing of a cat and a dog! Cat Quest was
cute, but with a friend it’s about to get even cuter.Knights of the ring table It’s a cat-eat-dog world
Fight Knight Cat Quest 2
FORMAT PS4 / PLAYERS 1
DEV TEAM SORCEROBEFORMAT PS4 / PLAYERS 1-2
DEV THE GENTLEBROSWhile the horror genre is well stuffed, not many
games capture the feeling of being among a group
of teens struggling to make it through a night alive- and record evidence as proof. The Blackout Club
has a team of up to four players desperately trying
to survive a phenomenon in their small town where
the residents all go sleepwalking, waking with no
memory. Players work together to avoid The Shape,
a monster that can only be seen when your eyes are
closed, through procedurally generated missions.
Not everything’s black or white
The Blackout Club
FORMAT PS4 / PLAYERS 1-4
DEV QUESTIONOPM: Where did the idea
for the framing narrative
of the journal in Lost
Words come from?
Mark Backler: The game
originally started from the
Ludum Dare game jam with
the theme of ‘minimalism’, with
the intention of it being a bit like
Tetris, but dropping words instead
of blocks and you had a playable
character too. The idea was that
you’d drop words from a quote
which landed vertically in
ascending length order so you
could climb up them with your
character to reach a goal at the top
of the screen. When I ran the game
before I had physics on the words,
though, the character dropped
down and landed on the sentence
which hung in the middle of the
screen, and I thought that that was
really striking and much better
than my original idea so I went
with that instead! I liked the
concept so much that I kept
working on it after the game jam
and it grew from there. I love
narrative games so I knew I wanted
to add a story to it, and as you
were walking on words a journal
seemed to make perfect sense.OPM: Do you think games
stimulate the imagination?
MB: Absolutely. All art and media
has the potential to inspire peopleand stir their imaginations and I
think that with games this is
especially so, due to their
interactivity and allowing for a
much greater breadth and depth of
engagement than other mediums.OPM: Do you think the indie
games space allows you to
explore things not possible in
Triple-A games?
MB: I think that there’s definitely
more freedom with smaller teams
and being independent. It’s a lot
easier to take risks. I think some
Triple-A companies find it hard
because when you have teams of
hundreds or thousands of people
and your burn rate is phenomenally
high, it can make big studios quite
risk-averse. Although in an
industry like videogames,
sometimes not taking risks is the
bigger risk, as if you’re doing
what’s been done before then
there’s probably nothing making
your game stand out from all therest. Having said that, some
companies have done very well by
jumping on bandwagons but you
never know if that will work out or
if the wheels are about to fall off!
We are seeing bigger companies
try out more experimental
concepts, though. Hellblade is a
game that sits beyond indie but
still wasn’t a Triple-A budget, and
Ninja Theory did a great job ofusing that as a means to help cast
light on the real-world issues of
mental health and psychosis. They
did that through partnering with
the Wellcome Trust, who we’re
also working with for Lost Words
in order to examine the link
between grief and memory, in
collaboration with Cambridge
University researcher Caitlin
Hitchcock. Another great example
is Life Is Strange, which is a really
wonderful game from a big studio
that looks at issues like suicide
with a high degree of sensitivity
and nuance.Lost Words
Sketchbook Games’ creative director Mark Backler hasn’t lost his
vocab – he’s telling us why indie is so importantQA&
“I THINK THERE’S
DEFINITELY MORE
FREEDOM WITH
SMALLER TEAMS.”
Lost Words sees you using words
to solve platforming puzzles.