Studio Reset is confident you’ll never find a AAA studio making something like its upcoming supernatural mystery game, The Eventide – and its developers would know. The new indie company is made up of BioWare veterans who’ve worked on games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age, and The Eventide leads remind GamesRadar+ in an interview that AAA gaming is prone to too much worrying to really luxuriate in the misty X Files vibes they’re cultivating.
“Because we are indie, we can take these sort of creative risks that maybe were not available to us in larger companies,” says Studio Reset creative director Kaelin Lavallee. “And that’s not a knock against larger companies. They have their place and they can do what they do, and they do it well, but at the end of the day, there’s a little bit more risk aversion there.” So, Lavallee, art director Francis Lacuna, and design director Kris Schoneberg all agree: The Eventide is a creative opportunity they never had before.
A press release describes the paranormal investigation game as “neon-noir.” Players will assign two agents with their own unique skills to each strange case that passes their desk in a grungy, but colorfully lit Canadian city.
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“As the unseen hand guiding the agency’s operations,” the press release explains, “players will assign investigators to a growing backlog of unexplained incidents scattered across the city. Each agent brings their own background, beliefs, expertise, and way of seeing the world.”
You can get former detective Sam “Brass” Hingle in on a case that requires social discretion, for example, or have cryptozoologist Evelyn “Eve” Atwood put her unconventional biology skills to work.
The game, made in Unreal Engine 5, will purportedly mix “supernatural mystery, mature narrative themes, fixed-camera 3D exploration, agent-driven investigation, and a word-based deduction system to create a detective fantasy around case files, redacted truths, and the uncomfortable space between what happened and what people are able to understand,” the press release continues.
This smudgy game made up of frowning characters in long coats sounds like mystical, cigar-puffing fun. Lacuna tells GamesRadar+, “I don’t think in any of my previous experiences working on big, multi-million-dollar projects, they would ever greenlight an aesthetic that I am interested in achieving here.”
“Like, this painterly [visual] effect would not exist,” Lacuna continues, noting, “It exists in the indie world, in the space. It does not exist in the AAA space, and I think that that for me is a great opportunity.”
“AAA can throw money at a problem,” Lavallee adds, cutting a deeper line between Studio Reset and its developers’ BioWare past. “Money, people, and it’ll get sorted out. Is it the right solution? Is it the most fun result? Debatable. We can’t do that. It’s just us” – a team prioritizing creative freedom over all else.