LITTLE DEVIL INSIDE
Since Neostream’s striking adventure previously featured here, a full year has passed, and more than six since its successful Kickstarter campaign. Given its surprise reappearance at an otherwise underwhelming State Of Play showcase, we’re overdue a catchup with one of our most eagerly anticipated games. Over the past 12 months, “quite a lot has happened,” the studio’s business development director John Choi tells us. On the development side, this inexperienced group has had to adapt to working on PS5 – though on this evidence it’s learning quickly – while on the business side, it’s exploring the possibility of striking a publishing deal. Choi says Neostream is keen “to get the game to as many [players] as possible upon release and after.”
Attracting more people to make the game has, in part, contributed to its long development, Choi notes. “With the limited pool of experienced console developers in our region, this hasn’t been easy,” he says. As such, the current team has been running into unfamiliar technical issues now and again. “We’re trying to tackle them as best we can without cutting too many corners,” he adds.
To look at Little Devil Inside, you wouldn’t think it had been a struggle, though Choi admits the charming tilt-shift aesthetic used for the world map has caused its fair share of headaches. After focusing on the game’s realtime action in previous footage, this might have seemed an odd choice for an update, but Neostream was keen to show how protagonist Billy gets around: “A lot of our audience were curious how that works, so we figured this was our opportunity to reveal it.”
The map is more than just something to pull up briefly to check your bearing or pick your next destination before heading back into the game – in fact, it’s an integral part of Billy’s journey. “It’s an experience of its own, and a tool to express the poetic narrative style and pace of the game,” Choi says. “And, once again, to try and create that mental space for the player to imagine.”
Ah, yes. When we previously spoke to Choi, he explained that minimalism was a guiding principle for Little Devil Inside. Yet every time we see more of it, we see new mechanics, new encounters – in this case, even a new visual style for the map segments. How does it square those two things away? Can it really stay true to that minimalist ethos when Billy’s quest has so many disparate parts? “OK, this is a hard one,” Choi says. “Our intention has never been just making things ‘simple’, per se. Rather, we are trying to express the minimalistic concept, with simplicity at one end of the scale and depth in detail at the other end.”
The goal, he says, is to give players enough room to draw upon both their imaginations and their own nostalgic reminiscences of classic videogames – and Neostream aims to achieve that by deliberately using contrasting styles within the game: “An unrealistic toy-like character moving and behaving realistically, simplelooking objects placed in a very detailed physical environment, miniature-like world map versus realtime gameplay – [they] are all part of this intention.”
Across the map, you will encounter a range of events and characters: some, Choi says, are designed to simply add flavour to travelling, while others launch you into the game’s realtime sections, whether it be combat or exploration or solving puzzles. Some, he says, are triggered by missions; others are fixed; some encounters recur throughout your adventure; and there are random events besides.
Away from the map, we do get another fleeting glimpse of combat, of which the standout moment involves Billy running an enemy through with his sword before throwing his hapless victim at another encroaching critter. “Once again, adhering to our main design concept, the governing combat design principle is ‘easy to play, hard to master’,” Choi says. Despite the shallow focus of its map visuals, in other words, this is a game with shimmering depths to each of its fascinating facets.
The map is “an experience of its own, and a tool to express the poetic narrative style”