STANDING ON A BEACH
From harsh survivalist adventure to gentle, reflective puzzle game, Rime has evolved considerably throughout its development. DAVID WILDGOOSE goes back to the island to find out why...
Pristine blue water laps against the shore, its white foam fringe briefly darkening the sand before retreating. Further down the beach a thin headland reaches out to support a brilliant white tower like a hand holding a candle above the ocean. The sun is high in the sky, there are birds singing and crabs scuttling across the sand. It’s an idyllic setting for a game. But some players just didn’t get it.
“This is not like Halo,” Rime creative director Raul Rubio recalls one playtester telling him.
“I asked him why he thought it would be like Halo and he said ‘I dunno, because you start on a beach?”
Confusion about Rime extends beyond simple-minded playtesters whose gaming experience starts and ends with Halo 1’s Silent Cartographer level. When Rubio and the team at Spanish development studio Tequila Works, best known for 2012’s zombiethemed platformer Deadlight, were shopping Rime around to prospective publishers, many of them didn’t quite know what to make of it either.
“When we first start showing the game to publishers, especially Japanese publishers, they’d say this looks so original and exotic,” Rubio tells me.
“We were surprised. For us we look outside our window and we see the Mediterranean Sea. Publishers would ask us if it is supposed to be the Caribbean. We’d say no, it’s just our home.”
Part of the confusion may be attributable to Rime’s evolving development process. After shipping Deadlight in 2012, Tequila Works brainstormed its next title via an internal game jam. All staff were
encouraged to play around with their own ideas for prototypes and let their imaginations run wild. The game that would eventually become Rime was born during this process.
SO YOUNG
That initial concept was a survival game. Players had to gather food, find water, hunt wild animals and build shelter. But it wasn’t the game Tequila Works really wanted to make. So they began stripping it back, trying to find the core essence of Rime: in the end they found the island, the tower and the castaway. From here they rebuilt the game from, as Rubio describes it, first principles.
“We want to find the extraordinary in ordinary things,” says Rubio.
“With Rime we wanted to make something that felt personal. When we were kids and we took summer vacations we would go to the beach. We would have months of adventure and exploring. Remember, this is Spain and so everything is pretty old. But because we were children everything was also new to us. So that’s where we started.
“What if we made a game where instead of having a clear goal, we wanted to make the player feel like a kid again? A game where you have no idea what the rules of this new world are and you have to discover it by yourself. So instead of explaining everything, tutorialising everything, telling you what to do and where to go, what if we stranded you on the island for real?”
My first few minutes spent playing Rime encapsulate this feeling perfectly. I know I’m on an island, I feel like I’m
you have no idea what the rules of this new world are and you have to discover them
alone and I have no idea how or why I’m here. All I know is that there’s a tower in the distance and I can’t get into it.
I run around and get a feel for the way my character moves, all gangly limbs that he never quite seems fully in control of. There’s a momentum, an eagerness and a clumsiness to his movement that instantly reminds me of my own childhood holidays spent clambering around water-slick rocks at the beach.
I press a button and he shouts. I do
this a few times, hearing it echo off the surrounding stone slabs. I feel like I’m lost and alone and calling out in the hope that someone else is there. I shout again, this time near a small green statue of what looks like a monkey. It glows. I find another statue and shout again. It glows too.
I spy a cute little fox and follow it until a few minutes later I find several green statues nearby. I position myself roughly equidistant to them and shout again. All three statues glow and a door opens up in the wall ahead of me.
ANIMAL LOVER
Tequila Works soon found they wanted Rime to be about exploration and discovery. Their original vision of the game’s protagonist, the castaway, was of a stereotypical fit, muscled man. As the game changed, so did the player avatar, from capable adult to naive but inquisitive child. And with this change in tone, the whole game shifted in terms of mechanics, from survival to solving puzzles.
“When you’re a kid you’re not aware of the dangers of the world, right?” says Rubio. “Kids represent fearless exploration. At first we had a stamina system, but it was restrictive when we wanted you to be able to explore everywhere.”
Once the main character was established, Rubio says the core of Rime’s gameplay flowed naturally. Kids want to explore so Rime needs large open locations and a traversal system that allows players to run, climb, swim and jump around the island. Kids are curious and like to prod and push at things so Rime should be about environmental puzzles that encourage players to experiment and discover how things work.
Kids also like to make lots of noise, as Rubio, the father of a small child, explains.
“When we were thinking about all the stuff you could do as a kid, shouting was at the top of the list,” he laughs.
“We realised this allowed us to strengthen the player’s bond with the kid. Remember, the kid doesn’t talk, so a lot of his expressiveness is done through animation. Whether he’s feeling happy or sad or scared you can see it because his movements are changing to reflect those feelings.
“The shout is contextual, it changes a lot depending on where you are and what you’re doing. Sometimes he’s singing, sometimes he’s just calling out, other times he’s trying to communicate with the fox or urge other creatures
away. You start to understand how he’s feeling, and of course you’re hopefully feeling the same way.”
I keep exploring the island. I find an apple tree and am able to pick its oversized fruit and carry it around for reasons I don’t yet understand. I find a pig and chase it around, never quite able to catch it. I wander into what appear to be the ruins of long-abandoned temples and poke around. I keep shouting.
“In terms of the puzzle mechanics, the shouting works because it helps create a world that feels real but also where magic is possible,” Rubio explains.
“When you’re shouting at a statue and it causes its hands to start waving and suddenly a door opens, it makes no sense. But it’s not just random.
“We took a lot of care in conveying a visual language. All the green elements, like the jade statues, are activated by sound and, more importantly, all of them open something. Everything yellow indicates a physical interaction, so gold objects are things that you can push or pull, for example.”
Scattered around the temples I find stone blocks trimmed with gold. I’m able to push and pull them. Some of the blocks hold more green statues and I’m able to move these into positions that allow me to shout and trigger more doors to open. Other blocks are simple weights I can move onto various pressure plates. Others still support golden geometric shapes that when viewed from a particular perspective cause a kind of trompe l’oeil effect that triggers environmental changes.
Rubio is keen to stress that the puzzles have been designed so that a player with “no clues, no tutorials, no nothing” is able to solve them. My experience so far suggests that this doesn’t mean the puzzles remain simple, but rather it means that the mechanics used to solve them are always consistent.
EVERYTHING FLOWS
the shouting works to help create a world that feels real but where magic is possible
Solving each puzzle rewards me with new avenues to explore but it doesn’t feel like I’m moving from one puzzle room to the next. My progression through this part of the island feels organic and free of artifical gating. I suspect this is born from the developer’s decision over the course of its extensive playtesting to strip away puzzles that didn’t add anything to the game or were only there to hold the player up.
“We started playtesting very early in development,” says Rubio. “We were removing many of the things we knew worked in games, like the combat, so we were scared about what we were doing.
“Obviously we knew we couldn’t please everyone but it was important to know why some players were getting frustrated. One of the important things we learned was from players getting frustrated at not knowing why they were having to solve a certain puzzle. They were having fun exploring and then they were asking what has this puzzle got to do with the rest of the game?
“I can tell you that in the beginning they were too complex. Now they’re more accessible and also more gratifying. We find players are able to discover the solutions for themselves, whereas in the past they were having to ask us for solutions. That’s a big difference.”
I just want to point out that I didn’t ask for solutions during my play session. Sure, I got completely lost at one point and did restart the demo over again, but I declined all hints. I even solved one puzzle in a way that the PR rep looking over my shoulder mentioned they hadn’t even seen.
If you do get stuck though, Rime has a way to help you out. But in keeping with the rest of the game, it does so in a subtle, unobtrusive kind of way.
“When you feel lost, we have the fox,” Rubio explains.
The fox acts as a kind of “player guidance system” whose job it is to ensure you are never lost on the island. But it serves a dual purpose in also becoming a narrative element. Rubio’s hope is that players will care about the fox and then bond with the fox. And at the same time the fox itself goes from being this wild animal to connecting with the kid and learning to tame those wild instincts.
When I ask why a fox, specifically, or whether it could have been another animal, Rubio says the fox is a reference to the classic French tale The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. In the book, the titular prince comes to Earth and befriends a fox who helps him understand human nature. “It could have been a dog,” he admits. “But we liked the idea of the fox better. Remember it’s a wild animal so it’s not going to stay with you all the time. A fox is going to take some interest in the kid, play with him a bit, and then run away. He’s not supposed to be your pet.”
The fox got me back on track a couple of times. I particularly appreciated how his bright orange fur made him stand out even from distance. There was one moment when I was wandering around and spotted the fox perched on a ledge way over there. I trotted on over and was immediately sucked into examining a brand new puzzle. It felt natural; the fox was beckoning me rather than nagging me about what to do next.
“One thing players enjoy is when they’re playing along, they start to feel stuck on a puzzle, and suddenly they see the fox somewhere, and they’re like ‘Oh, I can see up there! I wonder what that means?’” says Rubio, who I swear was not
watching me play his game earlier. (It’s true, he’s in Madrid; I’m in Sydney.)
“The fox comes and goes,” he adds. “We like to think that the fox more often appears when the player needs the fox, not the other way round.”
THE WILD ONES
Two of my favourite games of recent years are The Witness and The Talos Principle. Playing through the early areas of Rime reminded me of both of them in some obvious and some not-so-obvious ways. They’re all puzzle games, broadly speaking, though they each take a different approach to the type of puzzle they present. They’re lonely, isolated experiences intended to allow for plenty of contemplative downtime between epiphanies. But they also possess a central, driving mystery: who built this place, and why?
Rubio tells me he wants the island itself to be a character in the game, perhaps even the main character. He wants the island to tell you a story. Paying attention to the environment is not only an aid to exploration or puzzle-solving, but there’s a narrative purpose too.
“I never say that you were invited to the island,” he says.
“You are simply here on the island. When you start the game everything is colourful and cheerful and full of life. But once the island knows that you are there, maybe the reaction is not so good. This is not about good or evil, but maybe you are trespassing?”
He won’t elaborate further. I consider asking him if he ever watched Lost, but I’m trying to push from my mind all thought of John Locke insisting that the island brought him there for a reason.
Rime’s island is intriguing, though. There’s a weirdness and a sadness to it, not to mention the very occasional glimpse of a cloaked figure watching me off in the distance. I want to know more. I want to spend more time shimmying up Rime’s weathered monoliths, scouting its remote caverns, toying with its ancient contraptions.
“Telling a story is about how you feel when you experience that story,” says Rubio.
“It’s not literally about the words, it’s about the message. The best stories in games are not about the lines of dialogue you remember, but about remembering how you felt when you played them.”
If Rime lives up to expectations, there are three things it’ll be remembered for: the island, the tower, the castaway.