Approaching the release of Mundaun—a haunting pencil-drawn horror game set in the Alps—Game Rant had a chance to talk with the game’s creator Michel Ziegler about his work. With textures fully hand-drawn in pencil, Mundaun‘s visual style lends it a sense of artistry and atmosphere that few games achieve. We wanted to find out more from Ziegler about how he created Mundaun, but also learned about what he would make if given more resources and a larger development team.
Games like Mundaun that focus on artstyle and experimentation before anything else are relatively uncommon, and they are typically made by smaller teams or even just individual people. Even so, exceptionally artistic games can often have a profound effect on the games industry even if they aren’t blockbuster hits with massive player counts. We asked Ziegler, a developer of a very experimental game, if he believes there’s room in the industry for larger scale games to focus on trying new things even at the expense of broad appeal.
I would hope so! But those seem to be far and few between. The last large-scale but very experimental game I can remember is Death Stranding. Fumito Ueda also comes to mind. The games he designs are large from a production value standpoint, but also very intimate and experimental. I might be wrong, but I feel like there is more outside of the box thinking in Japan than in the West when it comes to big budget titles. I do think there is a lot of room for more experimenting, however, and a lot of interesting stuff is being created by studios that are somewhere in between the very small indie and the AAA.
Death Stranding certainly did have a massive impact on the industry, even if reviews were mixed and opinions varied widely about how much fun it was and whether it deserved praise or scorn. Ziegler also mentioned Fumito Ueda, who was responsible for Shadow of the Colossus and The Last Guardian—games that are now widely recognized as influential cult classics but perhaps a limited appeal. This made us wonder what someone like Ziegler would do with the resources of a massive studio.
I love games that go for a large scale world. I have always been fascinated by big open worlds ever since they first emerged. So that would be something I would try to do a take on, but have a scenario that is fresh. I have sometimes fantasized what a Mundaun could look like on a bigger scale when I looked over the valley. And I imagined that I could go or drive anywhere that my eye can see. Take a train. But the world is full of unique places, people and stories. I would try and spend more development time on fleshing the world out instead of creating the most realistic graphics or animations. Take a AAA budget and studio but don’t spend it on the usual AAA things but on things that matter more to me.
The prospect of a AAA game in which small details of storytelling and worldbuilding are given as much or more budget than the visuals is interesting indeed, and instantly stirs the imagination. However, Ziegler also expressed that there are distinct benefits to working on smaller games, uninhibited by the large team structures and expectations of bigger projects. When asked if there are any advantages to focusing on smaller titles, Ziegler had this to say:
I think the biggest advantage is to be able to spontaneously try things and let ideas while already prototyping. I imagine there is a lot more coordination from the very start with bigger teams and games. I don’t like to take a blank sheet of paper and write in detail what I am going to do. My way of working, no matter what I’m doing, is to try things quickly in practice. I think this freedom of letting a game grow organically can potentially yield some interesting and unorthodox games.
Mundaun will launch on March 16, 2021, on PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
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