What Remains Of Edith Finch is a very upsetting collection of interactive short stories about the brief, tragic lives of a cursed family who live in a monstrous treehouse. It’s also a wonderful show of experimentation, switching genres from story to story – one minute you’re a playable bestiary on shuffle, the next you’re beheading fish in a cannery as the worktable disappears beneath your scrolling daydreams. The developer’s next project seems to be pursuing a similar balance of whimsy and darkness. It’s another anthology experience, which casts you as a field biologist studying “the strangeness of organic life”. Also, chicken-legged houses.
While the project has yet to be formally announced, Giant Sparrow’s founder and director Ian Dallas has shared a little about its wiggly inner workings with the New York Times. There’s also a smidgeon of info on the developer’s blog – the URL suggests the project’s working title is “Heron” – according to which Giant Sparrow are “drawing inspiration from places like Ico, Windosill, Spirited Away, and David Attenborough nature documentaries, along with the spirit of early animators like Winsor McCay and Walt Disney who used (for the time) cutting edge technology to build something that didn’t feel technical at all but instead felt weirdly alive.”
If the project takes inspiration from nature documentaries, it also takes inspiration from Dallas’s disappointment about nature documentaries. He feels they’re often rather broad and superficial, with too much cutting between creatures and places. “They work in part because it’s like a distraction for a toddler,” he told the NYT. Careful, Dallas, I hear David Attenborough’s got a mean left hook for a guy his age.
Giant Sparrow’s designers have also found the nature documentary premise to be a bit of a glass ceiling, resulting in lukewarm concepts “like a photographing mini game, or like collecting 10 ladybugs or whatever.” Hence, in part, the planned introduction of more fantastical creatures that might give rise to more complex approaches. Going by the concept artworks from the NYT piece, the menagerie currently ranges from regular chickens (complete with pooping functionality) to chickens that have gotten themselves confused with mobile homes. “When we started adding a few slightly goofy elements, that led us to some stranger and more interesting places,” Dallas went on.
That said, part of the aim here is simply “to call out just how weird biology is” and encourage reflection on “how many bizarre things are going on around us all the time”, rather than weaving a fairytale.
They’re also aiming for a more “exploratory and playful” world, with Dallas commenting that “single-player games often feel like a chess board – a world that’s highly predictable and entirely designed to facilitate the limited set of actions a player is capable of.” Here’s a work-in-progress example of an in-game scenario: trying to coax a giraffe into coming over and lowering its head at the right angle, so that you can put something on it.
There’s an element of horror, which has intensified as Giant Sparrow have investigated various creatures and realised just how bizarre, say, a butterfly’s reproductive cycle is by the standards of stinky, non-holometabolous human beings. “What we have slowly found our way to is a game where animals feel gross and maybe you have this visceral reaction to, in the way that like, when a caterpillar walks over your finger there’s something about all those legs moving that’s really disturbing but also fascinating,” Dallas said.
Long story short, Giant Sparrow’s new game is a real blend of emotions, which is just how I like my emotions, personally. Going beyond the constraint of the nature documentary format, I’d love to know if the developers have thought about how their design expertise and experience may have structured their ideas about nonhuman creatures in advance.
I’m also interested to know whether the animals in the game are portrayed as passive, with the player making choices that progress the simulation, and whether there will be any interrogation of biology as a knowledge-making discipline. I have a lot of questions, yes.
Beyond that, I definitely get a Jeff Vandermeer/New Weird vibe from all this. It sounds a bit like the up-market version of the recent Zoochosis, in which you’d best avoid getting too cosy with the giraffes. Incidentally, if your first thought on seeing the chicken house was “I want one”, maybe check out Reka.