Can you tell us a bit about your studio?Betard: Unreliable Narrators is an independent Quebec video game studio that creates narrative games to give a voice to underrepresented communities. We aim to tell the untold side of history through our games and introduce unusual heroes, such as Maïkan, the young Innu, who was created in consultation with Indigenous partners. The studio collaborates with an Elder Council and other Indigenous partners to ensure we respect the Innu culture, their traditions, and their legends. In this first project, part of the team—including the composer and sound designer, art director, actors, and story writer—is Indigenous.
Ruffiange: We are a new team of developers with a common passion for narrative games. Another one of our goals with the games we make is democratization. Everyone can enjoy a great story, yet in games these stories are often made inaccessible for some audiences by being locked behind challenges and fail states. We believe that the games we make can bridge the gap with new players through accessibility, while also providing an alternative, but enjoyable, experience for adept gamers.
Players step into the shoes of Jeanne, a shipwrecked French settler, and Maïkan, a young Innu hunter. Why was it important for the team to show both viewpoints for this story?
Betard: The team at Unreliable Narrators believes that showing both the Innu and French perspectives is crucial to telling the story of their encounter in 17th century Canada. Our game offers two different universes with two artistic directions and two sound directions to highlight the opposing viewpoints of Jeanne and Maïkan. We want to provide an immersive experience that allows players to see the same events through different pairs of eyes, similar to how Game of Thrones or Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos showed the same story from different perspectives. By building our game on different viewpoints, we aim to demonstrate that every story can have multiple angles and interpretations, and that pure good or evil doesn’t really exist in real life.
Ruffiange: As mentioned earlier, the contents of history books and classes often provide a limited perspective based on the biases of the people that write them. For obvious reasons, this gap of knowledge is especially accentuated when it comes to Indigenous people. But Indigenous culture also remains pretty unknown to the general public because it mostly relies on oral traditions to transmit history. With our partners, we had the chance to dig deeper into this oral history in order to inspire our characters and the setting of our game, and we hopefully wish to make these beautiful but lesser-known cultures more visible through the experience of playing Two Falls.
Source: Unreal Engine Blog