When planning Nascence, our main concern was: what’s the best way to deliver a touching and interesting story while also

Be horror
Be fun
Be engaging

This required us to analyze what made the old point&click adventure games great, analyzing the industry around us and what makes us unique.

So, in this article let’s discuss the first point.

Be Horror

We love horror games, so that’s what we want to do. The kind of horror we like is “atmospheric horror”, “psychological horror” and “personal horror”.

We wanted to avoid the popular “jump scare horror”, for a double reason:

It’s expensive to make and feels cheap

This means that to prepare a jump scare that works, you must prepare a specific scene, with a series of elements: something that calls your attention, something that increase your tension, something that releases such tension and something that jumps out catching you in your “low-tension” moment.

This includes specific animations, characters, cameras and audio. That's a lot of work and money for such little playtime.

Still, even with all the resources invested, it feels cheap. After the 10th jump, you’ll know the pattern: you’re going to laugh at it.

Because of this, our solution was to go towards what made you love “Anna” and other great games like “Amnesia”, “SOMA”, “Silent Hill 2” and some old games like “Shadow of the comet”, “Sanitarium” and “Dreamweb”.

Let’s try to summarize the elements we like:

Supernatural is not in your face: you witness the result of it.
How much is in the mind of the main character and how much is real?
Your character is not a hero
The game is directed to 18+ players and the themes treated are part of their life (example: sexuality, religion, fear of losing your job, fear of losing your love, fear of not being appreciated, relationship with parents and so on)

Of course, we’re not dealing with all those issues: we are concentrating on religion, relationships and personality disorders.

Dealing with these issues is not easy for many reasons: first of all it’s easy to fall into stereotypes, and that’s the worst thing you can do. Doing that, it’s easy to treat the problem as a minor inconvenience that can be easily solved.

Because of that we’ve been working with experts and doctors to avoid such problem.

For us, fear must creep into you and stay with you long after you closed the game, because it will make you think about what you saw and about you.

Of course, we hope this is your cup of tea.