CALL OF THE SEA
Even if its island setting hadn’t been quite so easy on the eye, the debut game from aptly-named Spanish studio Out Of The Blue would have stood out a mile during Microsoft’s Xbox Series X showcase. This colourful 1930s-set firstperson adventure went very much against the dark, gritty grain – so it’s a surprise when game director Tatiana Delgado mentions HP Lovecraft as an influence. Though it’s not the game’s most significant element, Call Of The Sea will occasionally dabble in the occult. It stems, she says, from a desire to show a different side to Lovecraftian fiction. “You usually only see one part of the stories he’s telling – tentacles, Cthulhu and so on – and we wanted to explore a different way.”
Exploration is at the heart of the game as protagonist Norah travels to an island in the South Pacific to look for her missing husband. Her character reflects her creators somewhat: as a 40-something, Norah is of a similar age to most of the 12-strong development team, and as she abandons her peaceful home life for a potentially very dangerous expedition, her journey is one of self-discovery, too. “Speaking for myself at least, sometimes it feels like when you’re 40, you cannot do anything new with your life. But it’s not true – you can start your life again, do whatever you want and change everything. Norah is stubborn and she needs to know what happened. Without spoiling anything, she goes to find her husband, but she finds out more things about herself.”
The studio’s own journey started in late 2018, but preproduction on the game didn’t begin until July of last year. Delgado and her team got together to discuss the games and stories that most inspired them: Myst, Riven, Firewatch and tabletop roleplaying games. You’ll probably detect elements of them all in Call Of The Sea, though Delgado is keen to point out that the Myst influence doesn’t extend to the incongruity of its puzzles. “We want them to be integrated in the world,” she says. “You have to observe your environment to understand it. Sometimes you’ll draw from your natural intuition, or you might discover a mechanism where you have to look at the purpose of it and try to understand how to make it work.”
If you’re worried about any of this getting in the way of the story, rest assured that the challenges Norah encounters have not been designed as roadblocks, and any epiphanies shouldn’t take long to arrive: “It’s narrative first, then puzzles,” Delgado explains. Some are directly associated with Norah’s search for her husband, as she locates clues to his whereabouts, while others may involve “unknown civilisations”. Either way, any time you need to don your thinking cap you’ll be rewarded with more of the story.
Much of that will be relayed by Norah herself, voiced with a clipped RP accent by an almost unrecognisable Cissy Jones. “When we saw her work in Firewatch, we absolutely loved how she managed to bring Delilah to life when you only hear her voice through the radio,” Delgado says. “We thought it was fantastic for a firstperson game to have someone with her talent, and the more we thought about it the more we realised, ‘She’s perfect.’” The studio wasn’t sure it could secure her services, but publisher Raw Fury made some calls, and after one meeting Jones fell in love with the character, Delgado says. “At that moment we realised that Cissy is Norah – she’s the one that needs to play her because she’s fantastic.”
All the same, Jones will have to go some to steal the thunder of the game’s other main character. The island should be the kind of place you would want to simply exist in, Delgado believes; a place where you’ll spend as much time stopping to take in the scenery as to uncover its many secrets. “That’s the reason we wanted to make a very beautiful environment,” she says. “We have some mystery, but there are no jump scares, there’s no horror. We want players to have a good time, to enjoy their time on the island.” Among all those next-gen dystopias, it looks like the ideal getaway destination.
Delgado points out that the Myst influence doesn’t extend to the incongruity of its puzzles