When We Made... Returnal


Harry Krueger and his team at Housemarque sent gamers on a trip to time-bending cosmic horror planet Atropos last year. Vince Pavey met with the game’s director and tried not to lose his mind while learning about what it was like developing that nightmare fuel


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Harry Krueger, game director at Housemarque


f you’re reading this article, you probably don’t need me to tell you that it is often hard to be a game developer. Even worse - you can put everything you have into a project, create an actual work of art, and after all that … it can just not catch on with players in the way that was hoped. No one wants to find themselves in that position, let alone find themselves in it over and over again following each new release. After creating a series of arcade shooters which were critical darlings, but had failed to translate into mainstream financial successes, Housemarque, the developers behind Resogun, Nex Machina and Matterfall, had realised it needed to adjust what it was were doing if the company was to survive. As part of an ‘ARCADE IS DEAD’ blog post that was made to announce Housemarque’s change in direction back in 2017, CEO Ilari Kuittinen rather bleakly said “I think we’ve seen the writing on the wall for quite a long time. We were just hoping that we might be able to reverse the tide.”


54 | MCV/DEVELOP October/November 2022


In its search for solutions, the having-to-adapt


studio revealed Stormdivers, a third-person multiplayer battle royale game with speeder bikes that frankly left most audiences unimpressed in the wake of giant competitors like Fortnite and Call of Duty: Warzone. It was quietly ‘put on hold’, as a new game - their “biggest and most ambitious title yet”, as described by Kuittinen - went into full scale production.


ARCADE IS DEAD, LONG LIVE ARCADE Four years later, Housemarque released Returnal, a cinematic action adventure game that at a first glance had more in common with something like Sony flagship franchises Uncharted and The Last of Us, but under closer approximation had lost none of the studio’s brand of hardcore arcade- style video game action at all. When it came to shifting towards that sort of presentation style for their latest project however, it was equally important to learn lessons from sci-fi horror masters across other mediums.


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