Little is known about Playmestudio’s upcoming horror gameThe Simulation,but it clearly impressed the folks at Blumhouse.The Simulationis one of many games beingpublished by Blumhouse Games, as revealed at Summer Game Fest. The premise is rather straightforward: players, as a retired game designer, aid the police in an investigation where the only evidence is an unknown horror game.
AtGamescom LATAM, Game Rant sat down withThe Simulation’s creative director David Fenner and producer Maureen Berho to hear more about the concept of the game. Fenner spoke more about howThe Simulationcompares to Playmestudio’s previous psychological thrillerThe Signifier,in terms of experimental design, puzzle philosophy, and much more.The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: Could I get you to say your names and your titles?
Fenner:Yes, I’m David Fenner. I’m the studio founder and creative director at Playmestudio.
Berho:I’m Maureen Berho, and I’m the producer and biz dev at Playmestudio.
The Simulation’s Development
Q: How did the idea forThe Simulationand the premise of being a game designer investigating all this come about?
Fenner:That’s a pretty good question with a pretty long answer[laughs]
It started around 2021. We were developing theVRversion ofThe Signifier, our biggest game.The Signifieris a pretty experimental project. We learned a lot from seeing people play it. When developing the VR version, we kept learning more about what we did, in a way translating it to another medium. Suddenly, there was this interest in exploring some of those ideas in a different and deeper way.
I’m sorry if I’m being too cryptic, but we wanted to explore it being a retired game designer. Like inThe Signifier, you have this dynamic where you are a psychiatrist, and you explore the mind. You have like an AI software that you talk to, so it creates this dynamic where you can observe things like, basically, in apoint-and-click adventure game. Both the main character and the AI have things in common.That creates an opportunity to gain context and get deeper into the story and puzzles with that context, both from the psychiatrist, who is like an expert on the mind, and the AI that gives more technical context.
The premise is only on a mechanical level. You are a retired game designer, investigating a case that involves a game that the police don’t know sh*t about. You talk with the police investigating and they’re there, and you’re a game designer as you explore things. It was the perfect recipe to have in the investigation have the proper context, as the game designer knows games, thinks about games, and thinks about the case. There’s this mystery, right? It just creates the perfect recipe to give the correct amount of information to the player as they figure things out. That’s on a gameplay level, but on a narrative level, of course, it also made a lot of sense.
Q: Can you talk a little bit about the experience of developing a game designer character as game designers?
Fenner:Well, it’s pretty cool. It’s pretty fun to do. It creates a great framework and an opportunity to have a relationship with the players in a way that’s always engaging and novel. It’s relatable if the game designer suddenly remembers things about games he played as a child or he talks about a game mechanic that should work one way but, for some reason, is not working that way. It’s just really fun to write. I think many players will have small smiles on their faces about different games they’ve played, the way they experienced those games, and how this opens the door to a new experience.
Q: What kind of horror isThe Simulationgoing for?
Fenner:Going back toThe Signifieragain, it wasn’t intended as a full horror game. It was more of a psychological thriller, but many people thought later that it should have been marketed as a horror game. You could say it’s a bit of aphilosophical horror. Also, like a Lynchian horror – you know, like David Lynch in films. There’s a lot of guessing, surrealism, and challenging your thoughts and your expectations, the mystery and what it all means, and the tension of the characters.
Of course, there will be a few jump scares and things that will get your adrenaline pumping a little bit, but there’s a deeper layer of horror that we really love that’s much more psychological, much more philosophical. Good horror explores deeper subjects about relationships, humans, psychology, and philosophy, and that’s what we’re aiming to explore: the human thing on a deep level and how players are really thinking. It’s not very specific like survival horror. It’s a very experimental approach that we’ll share more soon, but on a narrative level, it is very philosophical, it is very deep, and it can get really chilling as well.
Q: You mentioned how you’re carrying over some lessons fromThe Signifier- could you expand on any of those?
Fenner:The Signifierwas a huge experiment. In a way, it’s a very ambitious game in terms of its concept. You enter the mind, and you can reconstruct the mind in two states, both objective and subjective. There’s an AI that interprets the mind, and it makes mistakes. There’s always new small mechanics along the way and there’s always a sense of curiosity, so it was very risky, very experimental.
It was a huge learning process. I think we learned a lot about what the player accepts and is willing to, like, say, “Okay, I’m into this, I’m going to give this shot” and what they don’t. When you’re trying to have the player play new things, basically, and enter into places where it’s not really obvious where they’re going, it was a huge learning process. I think I’ve watched, I don’t know, 200 hours or more of streamers playing the game and seeing the comments.
Every risky decision we took, I think we know really well what it does for the player and the different types of players. So that alone is a great ground for this game because I think we really know what we’re doing here.The Signifieris still a really good game, but in the execution, I think, of course, we made some mistakes. Now we know what we’re doing, so just from my studio experience, it was a huge learning process.
We’re also taking some, I would say, similar premises of a game that is both narrative andpuzzle, but also does something new.The Simulationis also a game that does something new, and it goes further in that direction.The Signifieris very simple mechanic-wise, but it’s original, in a way, conceptually. Now, it’s also, gameplay-wise, based on a pretty original mechanic. Basically, there are too many waysThe SignifierinfluencesThe Simulation. This one goes fully into horror and is, of course, a different type of game, right? There’s something about the style and what we’re proposing as a studio that carries on that. It’s about taking risks and trying to use mechanics as something that can carry an emotion, going very deep into the art part of it to create an emotional response.
Q: Is there any sort of specific puzzle philosophy you’re following in the game?
Fenner:Ideally, the puzzles work both as a puzzle and as a narrative vehicle. They should never feel like a stop, just to keep moving forward in the game, but as something that is integrated with the experience and the world. There is a narrative reason why it’s there, it has narrative weight, and it means something.
Going back toThe Signifier, there’s a puzzle where there are these masks that you have to look through. If you look to one place and the other, there’s a different reaction in the subjective reconstruction of the mind. You have to solve where the masks should look, so the mind opens a new place, right? It’s a puzzle that you have to think “Alright, so this mask should look here probably because there’s like this memory that doesn’t want to be seen.” But it all tells something about the story of this person that you’re inside the memories of. That’s definitely something that we can say:puzzles should have meaning. You should be able to extract something, some information about the characters of the story, just by the puzzle itself. It’s not just “Alright, so I have to put this stone here for the door to open.” The game is wasting 15 minutes of that just because it needs to add content. No. The puzzle needs to make sense. It needs to add something. It’s not just a stop.
Yeah, there’s a puzzle in a game I’ve played once that comes to mind every time I hear that. It was the most frustrating thing I’ve ever seen in a game.
Fenner:Whenever there’s a game that just wants me to do something, just to add game time because they needed to add something, and it adds no artistic or narrative value, I just quit the game and uninstall it[laughs]
I wasted my time – don’t waste my time.
Experimental Design in The Signifier and The Simulation
Q: When you describedThe SignifierandThe Simulation, you called them both experimental. Could you expand on that? What draws you to being more experimental with games instead of making like a straight-up survival horror game?
Fenner:I think, from the get-go, we are trying to do things that are actually worth people’s time. I think that I’m trying to really add something to the gaming scene, and yeah, that may sound like just talk. However, I worked in advertising for 12 years, and I was makingThe Signifieron the weekends. If we’re going to do something that’s original, then we need to put so much love into it.
We don’t want to just think of markets and say, “Okay, horror games sell this” and attempt to make something like another game. We really want to make something unique that will inspire people and that opens different doors, new doors in gaming, and go all in on that. Because if not, it’s not worth it. As a studio, as a philosophy, there are no fillers. Time is valuable, and we really want players to play our games and say, “Hey, this was really worth my time on an emotional level.”
Beingexperimental, it’s not just about throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. It’s about that the belief that gaming is still art–in fact, we say something on the web page. It says a successful experimental project becomes an inevitable number one. That’s like a promising start, right? It’s just about the belief that there is still so much to be said in gaming, and that games can be a very powerful, emotional, artistic vehicle. Of course, we don’t want to see what’s out there and copy that. We want to open new doors and see if we can get to different new places in the mind and the soul and poke in there.
Working With Blumhouse Games on The Simulation
Q: What’s it been like working with Blumhouse Games on this project, and when did they come into it?
Fenner:Working with them has been “so far, so good.” We’re really happy with their support. They’re really supportive of our vision and really great so far. We’re really happy, and they really believe in the project. They share our passion with it. They are very open to taking risks, which is really cool. They came in when we started developing the game in 2021. We started pitching it right here at Big Festival 2022, then at Gamescom in 2022. Ee got a lot of interest. During that process, we had three offers in total.
Blumhouse came into the conversation a little later, since the concept itself got some eyes looking at it. Someone in the industry knew they were making this game division, and they said, “Hey, this game, go there before someone signs it.” We quickly found out that it was a really good fit, both like scope-wise amd the type of game we were looking at making. It was such a perfect fit.
Thoughts On Gamescom LATAM 2024
Q: Has anything special or major caught your eye for Gamescom LATAM so far?
Fenner:Well, I came to the floor today for the first time. I haven’t really been to everything, but It definitely looks like an upgrade from BIG Festival when I went in 2022 and more like Gamescom.
Berho:Well, it’s my first time. That’s what I have heard. It’s a big upgrade. It’s exciting to see the events happening here in the region because it opens the doors in terms of business for developers in Latin America.
Fenner:Yeah, and I’ve always felt like this downturn of the industry, in general. It’s a huge opportunity for Latin America in general because publishers are looking to work with other regions. There are many talenteddevelopers in Latin Americathat maybe, like, honestly, they can maybe add a little bang for their buck in a way in terms of scope. I think publishers looking for safer bets for investment will find some interesting things here. I definitely hope that this proves to be a good event for both publishers and developers, and that it keeps growing.
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