In the white room, with no curtains, near the station
A quick peek behind the scenes for you: Edge moved to new offices this month. It wasn’t your typical move, either. This was a real clearout, a proper life laundry – which, when you’ve been going for almost a quarter of a century, means getting rid of stuff. And we had an awful lot.
Everyone comes to a point in their lives when they have to let go of things that are important to them – but game makers don’t have the luxury of waiting 25 years between clearouts. The early part of a project’s life is a time of nonstop creativity; no concept is bad until it is proven to be so, and so there is a procession of great ideas. Then there comes a tipping point, when creativity gives way to necessity. As James Leach explains on p129, at some point, for some reason, the knife will fall, and its cuts can be brutal.
It’s a situation that recently presented itself to Tequila Works, the Spanish developer of this month’s cover game, Rime. After our visit for the cover of
E273 in 2014, the public were intrigued, but confused. What do you do in this game? How do you fight bad guys? How many dungeons are there?
It’s the standard response these days for any game whose purpose isn’t immediately obvious, and which doesn’t slot comfortably into an existing genre. But the public’s doubt soon transferred to the studio itself. Overcompensating, Tequila Works added mechanics it hadn’t planned for, and the game’s scope grew and grew. That beautiful, mysterious, sun-dappled island soon played host to over 500 puzzles.
Then came the tipping point, and the subsequent search for Rime’s soul – paring the game back to the elements that matter most – has been a key reason for the studio’s silence over the past few years. On p62 we catch up with Tequila Works to get the inside story on a project that anyone who’s ever had to throw away something they love will relate to. In Rime’s context, our office move feels like small beans – and we couldn’t get rid of it all, anyway, no matter the frivolity. The Edge bookshelf may be a little emptier these days, but you will pry our Nokia N-Gage collection from our cold, dead hands.