Bloober Team is shifting on from the psychological horror games it’s identified for, with the current Layers of Fear remaster being its final recreation of the style.
That mentioned, it is nonetheless sticking with horror. Instead, Bloober is now making “mass-market horror”.
What does that imply? Bloober says it is going to end in a renewed concentrate on gameplay over ambiance, owing to its games being described as “walking simulators”.
Studio co-founder Piotr Babieno did not deny that criticism in a current interview with Engadget.
“We focused on the story, we focused on the mood, we focused on the quality of graphics and music, but we didn’t put a lot of attention on the gameplay mechanics,” he mentioned. “It wasn’t our target. But we decided that there was a ceiling that we couldn’t break if we did not deliver something fresh, something new.”
As such: “This year is like closing the era of making psychological horror games. Right now we are going into Bloober Team 3.0, making mass-market horror.”
Bloober’s earlier games embrace Observer, Blair Witch and The Medium, which all thrived on ambiance over gameplay.
Of course, the underlying sentiment of “mass-market horror” is business success, maybe a key cause for the developer’s subsequent recreation being the remake of Konami’s Silent Hill 2 – a recreation that’s, satirically, a psychological horror however half of an current long-running sequence.
“We decided that our next titles should be much more mass-market oriented,” mentioned Babieno. “We’d like to talk with more people. We’d like to deliver our ideas, with our DNA, not by environment or storytelling, but by action. So all of our future titles will have a lot of gameplay mechanics. They will be much bigger.”
Babieno additionally commented on the state of horror games in 2023 and the way they could be a catharsis for the on a regular basis terrors of our world, together with the likes of local weather change, the world financial disaster, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“We are in a very specific moment in history because we have a lot of crises,” he mentioned. “As human beings, we would like to be prepared for something that is unexpected. Those fears are around us…we would like to deliver games that allow us to deal with our fears.”
The developer can be set to stay unbiased, as “only then will we be able to make something new, something fresh and creative,” mentioned Babieno. “I don’t want to create games by watching an Excel spreadsheet. I would like to deliver some new milestones of horror, our niche.”
The developer’s Silent Hill 2 remake nonetheless doesn’t have a agency launch date.
