Hírek
Tranquility meets chaos in CALX, a third-person action game born of many influences
J
John Walker
“Both games have an incredibly unique sense of adventure and journey, and masterful level design, sound design and storytelling,” Ferreccio says of the two Metroid games. “In particular, I find it incredibly fascinating how Super Metroid delivers an incredibly complex and layered narration, full of difficult themes, almost without saying a word. I think that, as an experience, can only be done with a video game.”
True Colors was born from a group of five students who studied game development together in Turin, Italy, and then continued working as a team post-graduation. After a lot of discarded prototypes and reworkings, eventually the group settled on the basis for CALX and then quickly signed with publisher Dear Villagers.
“CALX had many names and iterations during its production,” says Ferreccio. (You can still see one on the studio’s website where the game remains named XTAL!) “As we grew more confident, the project gained in complexity.”
The result is an impressive display of Metroid Prime-like exploration, played from a third-person perspective and with far more hands-on combat. Throw in a bit of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, some Hyper Light Drifter, and a distinctive art style, and you get a good idea of what CALX has to offer.
The planet Syro has been corrupted by something called the WARP, a trippy, fungal-like growth that brings with it a lot of WARP-affected enemies. Your character, the Seeker, is accompanied by a floaty robot that can fire off ranged attacks, while the Seeker provides the melee battling.
The key is to combine the two in battle to exploit the enemy weaknesses. Ranged attacks are great for removing the fungus, then melee steps in to dispatch the remains. Even in the earliest stages of CALX's opening Canyons, you encounter a large range of such enemies, from easily bopped mobs to more complicated mini-bosses with weak-points to exploit. As you might expect from a game inspired by Metroid Prime, you can also scan absolutely everything you encounter in CALX. Doing so will provide you with very useful information for how best to attack the various beasties.
The most immediately striking aspect of CALX is its art style. The 3D world looks hand-drawn, with bold colors splashed across intricately detailed architecture, crashed spaceships, and creature design. It’s reminiscent of Sable, and very attractive.
We asked Ferreccio how this style was developed. “When I was a child,” he replied, “I had a Silver Surfer comic book at home, bought by my dad. When I read it, something in me clicked, and I knew this comic in particular had something different from the other superhero comic books I had lying around.”
It wouldn’t be until years later that Ferreccio was able to put this into words. “The comic was drawn and colored by an amazing artist called Mœbius.”
Mœbius was artist Jean Giraud, considered one of the most influential French comic artists. That Silver Surfer two-part comic series was written by Stan Lee and went on to win an Eisner Award in 1989. “Mœbius’s influence can be seen everywhere in CALX, " says Ferreccio. In particular, he tells us, the biggest influence was The Incal, the book that appeared after Mœbius and filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s doomed Dune adaptation was canned.
It’s not just Mœbius who informed the design, however. Artist Phillippe Druillet, and his work on French comic anthology Métal Hurlant, also inspired CALX’s artwork. And, Ferreccio adds, “The game Sable was an incredibly valuable reference.”
When we asked Ferreccio if there were any elements of the game that took the team by surprise as they created CALX, the designer was quick with a “Yes!” Music is a key aspect of the game, not just for the atmosphere brought by its IDM (intelligent dance music) soundtrack, but also for its lore. “One of the ideas that came up during development was to make an area [of the game] work ‘on-beat,’ in sync with the music. It was very challenging to implement, and gave us a lot of issues, but we’re happy with the result. Honestly, most of our ideas came during testing, both from us and the QA team of Dear Villagers!”
As to how Ferreccio hopes a game so clearly constructed from a collection of inspirational sources will be received, he says it’s not for him to say. “We designed the game to be composed of a lot of recognizable elements,” he adds. “If I absolutely need to answer, I would say the mix of tranquility and chaos, the duality of combat and exploration, mixed with the IDM soundtrack and our art style, makes CALX memorable.”
He then adds, “Hopefully!”
CALX will be available on the Epic Games Store later this year.