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GameSpot: I have to ask: Why a kidnapper simulator?
Now Playing:Life Eater - Official Announcement Trailer
That can’t be a hugely marketable genre.
There’s stuff that reminds you of it, things like the Hitman series.
We have really interesting timeline-based games, even stuff like John Wick Hex.
But for the kidnapping sim, the horror-fantasy kidnapping sim in particular, there’s nothing there.
And the way that Strange Scaffold approaches its next projects is always a set of holistic questions.
[And] “Not just what game are we making, but how will we make it?”
And “What are the things that we’re calling from and pulling it into?”
And whenever I see an opportunity like that, it’s really hard to turn it down.
How do you do research for something like this?
I think the best horror emerges from asking a fairly innocuous question.
Poltergeist is an evil coming out of the television in the middle of the Satanic panic.
There are always attacks [against the player] that [work best in] horror.
Even John Carpenter’s The Thing.
What if your co-worker isn’t your co-worker but something wearing his skin?
That’s where it emerges.
No one shared their location.
No one shared pictures of where they were when they were at that location.
So a great example of this is geotags.
I didn’t think about that before this moment.
That’s kind of the thing.
was the basis for a lot of dark but interesting design questions.
And it has a ring camera in it.
And they got a free package.
It’s going to them.
Or that teddy bear has a camera inside of it.
I got somewhat of a nature, Druidic vibe from the trailer.
How does that inform the message of this horror?
It isn’t necessarily nature, but there’s definitely the idea of being held hostage by God.
I’m always interested in exploring relationship dynamics in my game.
Sunshine Shuffle kind of deals with interesting surrogate father dynamics and found family.
And for Life Eater, it’s this situation of someone being held hostage by God.
In this case, a dark god, Zimforth.
We’re in a golden age of horror right now.
Poppy’s Playtime, Bendy.
There’s a lot of things that end in ‘y’.
Why are you psychologically attacking me with your video game?
Because…I don’t know.
But I want something to shake me.
I like things now that fuck me up.
That is the jot down of experience that also speaks to me.
I make this, because these are the games that I love to play as a player.
There’s a fantastic series called Rusty Lake.
It was a Flash game series called Cube Escape, and then they became the Rusty Lake series.
And you realize that this person’s nipple is a circle.
And then you put the scalpel on the nipple, and it carves it open.
And then you plunge into their body.
It’s a very simple chain of logic.
Describe to me the moment-to-moment gameplay.
Are you just watching people?
Are you actually moving around and going to people’s houses?
So it’s an analog horror interface game.
You’re presented with the objective for the year.
That’s really cool.
Creepy as hell, but really cool.
[They are] these really creepy as hell, nuanced puzzles.
It was a crowded genre in the 2000s, alongside World War II horror games.
For too long, this genre has remained stagnant: the boomer shooter and the boomer kidnapper.
What’s it like to play this game a second time?
But the story mode, it’s very much a bespoke experience.
And we want to do the story mode justice.
So yeah, story mode…
Endless mode and post-game both come this March.
But yeah, the thing I compared it to is Murder Sudoku.
This interview was edited for both brevity and readability.
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