Shelter Devs Announce "Visual Narrative" Child Of Cooper
Alice is a monster
The last lesson developers Might & Delight had to teach about babies is that they're weak and foolish so leave them to die and live your life free from fretting. Or maybe you came away from Shelter with a different message, I don't know. Maybe their next lesson is that I'm a monster.
Announced today, Child of Cooper [official site] is told from the perspective of a child. They describe it as "a visual narrative that challenges aspects of normative video game storytelling", which means it'll be a bit weird. Let's have a look.
It's all a bit vague for now, so I'll quote heavily. M&D explained in today's announcement:
"In Child of Cooper you are reliving the memory of a child in a narrative that does not wait for your actions in order to move forward. Players step into the game much like a child entering a grown-up world. Nothing will be given to you at any point and even how to maneuver the game will be left for the player (the explorer) to discover. In the teaser we also show a first glimpse of the projects art style. A surrealistic, almost threatening style that highlights certain objects that the child remembers clearly while others are impossible to make out. Making sense of what you see in Child of Cooper is a big part of the experience."
They also asked a few questions:
"Can we approach games from a different standpoint than products of entertainment? Can virtues like replayability, difficulty, win and loss-conditions and "fun-factor" be explored from new positions?"
The answers to which are: 1) that depends on who "we" refers to; 2) yes.
As for how Child of Cooper will go about that, your guess is as good as mine right now. The ideas sound odd from a studio whose last game was a shoot 'em up built of craft materials but hey, oodles of folks have been poking at them further outside the mainstream in many strange and wonderful ways for years. Welcome to the weird side, Might & Delight. It's pretty cool over here.
They plan to release the game later this year. For now, a trailer:
