Man of Medan, the first in your anthology series, focused on the players’ moral compass and having to choose head or heart when making a decision. What drove that design decision?Samuels:
The mechanics around choices in The Dark Pictures are designed to be a constant reminder that the decisions made in the game, every decision, has a consequence. The interface being quite big and bold and in your face is a cue to stop and think, “Do I want my decision to be based on what I feel is right, or what I think is best, tactically, to keep everyone alive?”
In your second in the anthology, Little Hope, you seem to have made the game a bit more accessible to a broader audience by making controls a bit easier and response times a bit longer. What are your plans for House of Ashes in that regard? Did you find the sweet spot for difficulty with Little Hope, or is that something you’re still trying to nail?
Samuels: Our philosophy is that nothing is nailed, ever, but from game to game, we do place most focus on protecting those things that fans of our games like the most and improving those things that we receive the most requests to improve. It’s not realistic for us to assume that we can make everything perfect for everyone; people are different and have different preferences for how they play the game and enjoy that experience. The House of Ashes team has put a lot of thought into how best to empower players to set the game up to be played the way that they want to play it. Again, we will look to feedback from fans to see whether and how we develop those systems and interfaces for the future.
Man of Medan digs into the haunted ship trope and Little Hope is about a ghost town, and House of Ashes seems to be about awakening a sleeping evil. How do you settle on the horror themes for your anthology and are you trying to tell a bigger, metastory across the titles?
Samuels: At the outset, some five or so years ago, we determined the themes and high-level stories for eight games that make up the first two seasons of the Anthology. It was a lengthy exercise that involved studying the properties of stories in film, TV, and written fiction, across 39 recognizable sub-genres of horror and devising creative what-if scenarios for stories that mashed two or more of these together. As you can imagine, we came up with some interesting and quite bizarre stuff. We whittled that down to the eight themes that we felt would be the most interesting to explore. Each story is therefore a story in its own right. It’s not essential to have played the earlier games to understand and appreciate the later ones. Having said that, they are all set in the same universe, as evidenced by Easter eggs that can be found in each game that reference both earlier and later stories, and there is a parallel plot line. I can’t say more than that.
Source: Unreal Engine Blog