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Adorable Adventures and its clumsy baby boar might be the cutest game you play this year
J
John Walker
Who knew that this could include piggies?
It turns out, someone at the studio already did. “One of our team members volunteers at a wildlife rescue, and in particular works with boars here in the south of France,” Heide told me. “Through that we had the chance to encounter young boars, and we were sold immediately.”
Baby boars, says Heide, are “curious, playful, resilient, and smart. At the same time, they can be impulsive, clumsy and a little chaotic.”
All of that is core to playing Adorable Adventures, in which Boris (our boar) scampers and explores a bucolic land in an effort to find his scattered siblings. They'll have to work together to break their mother out of the abandoned shelter in which she’s trapped. Boris (who Heide describes as “like an unruly toddler discovering the world for the first time”) must follow myriad scent trails, learning to distinguish all the exciting new smells that surround him such that he can pinpoint the locations of his brothers and sisters.
To do this, the little chap needs to smell enough of various types of flowers, fungi, trash and (sorry) poo, such that he’s then able to know them well enough to eliminate their scents when sniffing for new trails. It’s a mechanic that Wild Sheep hoped would simulate the process of an animal “learning how to smell.” In practice, floating ribbons of scent float in the world and can be followed to their source, albeit sometimes gated by, well, literal gates which Boris needs the help of a certain number of siblings to charge through.
What stands out most as you play Adorable Adventures is the scampering, the incredibly realistic-looking way this puppy-like creature runs almost faster than his legs can manage—and the sideways skids when he stops. It’s incredibly charming, and bursting with character.
I wondered how the team had captured this so carefully. “We had the best reference by being in proximity to them,” says Heide, “but more importantly we have an excellent animation director who manages to capture those moments rather than simply recreating movement.” It turns out there’s no mocap here, which sadly means there’s no behind-the-scenes of a boar in a velcro outfit. But it does mean all of the boars' animation was hand-animated in Blender. The team made decisions based on “what a rebellious little boar would do.”
“We intentionally avoided overly precise controls,” says Heide. “Instead, we embraced slight inertia and imperfect responses so Boris always feels alive, physical, and a little unpredictable—like a real young animal learning how to exist in its body. When he runs, he does so with full abandon!”
You might be wondering why this little boar has a name, let alone is called Boris. It turns out it arrived because an in-engine asset needed a name, and then the team adopted it when referring to the character himself. “The response to this was great,” the creative director explains. “It gave him a personality. He’s still a young animal, but not just any young animal. He’s Boris.”
But don’t worry—there are no squeaky-voiced animals here. Adorable Adventures features a narrator, a companion voice that tells the story of the boars and their challenges as you play.
This character, the Forest Guard, was also an unplanned result of the development process. “We knew we wanted to tell a story,” says Heide, “but Boris needed to remain a real animal and couldn’t suddenly start talking. Inspired by BBC documentaries, a voiceover made sense—but rather than a typical storyteller, an observer worked great. Someone who knows slightly more than us about the park, nature, and boars, but shares our surprise at Boris’s actions. He became the perfect bridge between what we see on screen and what Boris must be feeling."
Adorable Adventures releases April 30 on the Epic Game Store.