‘We weren’t going to go halfway with this’
Niagara-made graphics-free video game arrives on PlayStation, Nintendo Switch
St. Catharines-based Falling Squirrel’s medieval combat adventure video game is meant to suck the player into some hostile territory in an immersive way.
And just as the main protagonist can’t see, neither can the player.
“The Vale: Shadow of the Crown” is a graphics-free video game featuring an adventure driven by audio and haptic controller feedback. It was nominated by the Game Awards in 2021 in the innovation and accessibility category.
“Just removing visuals, it immediately allows so much of the story to unfold in your mind,” said creator Dave Evans.
The game has been available on PC and Xbox since 2021. On Friday it dropped on the PlayStation Store and Nintendo eShop, with a price of $19.99, making it available for the first time on the Nintendo Switch, PS4 and PS5 platforms.
“We’re really excited to have more people have access to ‘The Vale,’ to playing it, to experiencing this world that Dave wrote and created,” said Paul Boyko of St. Catharines-based First Peoples Digital, the game’s publisher.
Evans, who had a career in film and television as a cinema director and voice director, found his way to the video game industry, doing cinema direction on a number of video game projects as well as voice direction.
But he also wanted to create his own video game, so he started Falling Squirrel.
“I wanted to work on a project that allowed me to work with narrative in a complex way that may make it very expensive to make a full-fledged video game, so I thought it might be interesting to make an audio-based game, not even knowing these things existed, or who plays them,” Evans said.
Early in the project, he got in touch with a person at the CNIB who has been blind since birth and is an avid gamer. Through that person Evans connected with the blind-gamer community.
Evans was able to learn about the flaws of other graphics-free games and built his game with that knowledge.
There are actually plenty of blind-accessible games out there, the most notable of which is “The Last of Us: Part II,” however, few games have the large production value of “The Vale.”
“We weren’t going to go halfway with this,” Evans said. “We wanted to make as big a game as we could, mainly because I wanted to make a bigger game.”
So, over a five-year period, Evans, mostly working on the project part time while doing other work, built his game, bringing in other people on contract over the years.
Boyko, who was a student of Niagara College’s game development program, where Evans teaches, was brought onto the project in the last few months.
Boyko, who has played the games at least 10 times, still gets rushes of emotion when playing it.
“By taking away the visuals, you almost create a more immersive, a more emotionally in-depth story.”
The game’s quality, Evans said, hinges on strong voice acting.
“As long as the actors are good, and that’s the one thing we had, great actors, you get drawn in and you’re not scrutinizing uncanny valley aspects of the graphics or the hair shade or the way the mouth is lining up,” he said.
Just removing visuals, it immediately allows so much of the story to unfold in your mind. DAVE EVANS VIDEO GAME CREATOR