With Halloween coming up in about a month, Beacon Pines is an excellent example of the creepiness that some games can arouse through graphics, storytelling, mechanics, and more. Beacon Pines is a new graphic adventure game from Hiding Spot Games in which players must unravel the mysteries of the titular city by exploring the world, meeting new characters and making clever use of charms. Charms are basically the in-game version of words, which players can collect in this indie game to change the course of the story.
Beacon Pines‘ art style is more cute than creepy, but the overarching story of Luka and other characters who populate the anthropomorphic city is quite the opposite. There is a general feeling of creepiness to Beacon Pines that the developers initially attributed to a resemblance to the classic creepy elements of the cult series Twin Peaksto discover that there is a more popular way to get the same message across thanks to Weird stuff. Game Rant spoke with Matt Meyer and Ilse Harting of Hiding Spot Games about what it was like to develop this unique game and what players can expect.
Why Beacon Pines’ Similarities To Winnie The Pooh And Stranger Things Make Sense
“Winnie the Pooh meets Weird stuff” might be an unexpected way to describe a narrative game about young anthropomorphic characters, but it makes perfect sense in the case of Beacon Pines. The art of the game was created by Harting after the trio of developers from Hiding Spot Games decided which direction to take Beacon Pines, which started out as a rhythm-based RPG fighter. The fact that Beacon Pines changing its trajectory to a more familiar modern setting was a boon to Harting, who managed to give the city and characters their own lives by merging European and American cities.
“I’m more at ease and in my comfort zone when it comes to real life than things like fantasy. There’s a more direct inspiration to draw from your surroundings, the people around you and how they interact with each other. I think it got easier to design the role for the characters once we determined it wouldn’t be fantasy, more like a city setting.”
The main character is a young deer named Luka, who draws a lot from the work of AA Milne. Luka deals with the death of his father and the disappearance of his mother, linked to the mysteries surrounding the city and its inhabitants, and leaves the protagonist and his friends the task of uncovering the secrets of Beacon Pines. Because there are sci-fi elements in the plot and because the story follows a group of children, the connection with Weird stuff is quite clear.
While Luka and his friend Rolo investigate ghostly phenomena in Beacon Pinesthe unintended similarities with Weird stuff doll, retaining a Winnie the Poohlike aesthetics for a quirky juxtaposition. Since Meyer and fellow developer Brent Calhoun were born in the 1980s, they grew up with a particular culture of movies, television shows, and books that were filled with stories of groups of young people trying to solve their city’s troubling mysteries. But given the development on Beacon Pines for what the game is now, started about five years ago, Weird stuff was not an active source of inspiration.
“Maybe it’s more of a trope or just a theme that was used a lot in the 80s, and it was kids in charge of saving the day. That’s still a theme you get a lot these days, too, but it is kind of a timeless theme that everyone can relate to because everyone has been a kid and felt like sometimes it’s up to them to do things because no adult trusts you to do anything. corresponds to Stranger Things.’
Anyway, Hiding Spot Games found a happy medium between Harting’s beautifully illustrated diary style and the strange, sometimes disturbing stories of Beacon Pines. Players can interact with the game in interesting ways compared to other narrative titles, as they can use a feature called The Chronicle to explore all the paths not taken in their game, and explore more sides of the characters and the story as a whole. to discover. Even though this was not conceived as a coming-of-age story a la Weird stuff, Beacon Pines is bold enough to use existing tropes and challenge them to be something more, and that’s something the industry will always need.
Beacon Pines is now available on PC, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
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