The new Moomins video game looks pretty
Little My fanclub, sound off
A new video game will visit Tove Jansson's wonderful world of the Moomins, and I am delighted. Due to launch next year, Snufkin: Melody Of Moominvalley will star the tootling nomad as he returns from his winter away only to find the Park Keeper has imposed order upon the freespirited valley by building parks everywhere. Sounds like a problem to be solved using friendship and mischief! It's quite pretty too, check out the trailer below.
That's pretty, that. I know Moomins mostly from the 90s cartoon, only a little from the books, but oh it's very nice. What a strange and beautiful tone. It always scared or unsettled me a little, and I like that. A few years back, our Graham wrote very nicely about how it's fun to think about a Moomin video game, and what any such game shouldn't be.
"It would seem simple then to take any one of these tales, or a collection of them all, and make it a quest. Moomintroll would substitute cleanly for almost any young boy protagonist in almost any Nintendo game, for example. Hemulens could be quest givers, hattifatteners could be enemies, and so on.
"Please don't. Moomin adventures resist structure, and rarely contain any kind of objective. Any travels and the events that happen during them are mostly about happenstance, undertaken out of a desire to entertain oneself and one's friends. A quest, a marker, a reward; all of these are antithetical to the spirit of the Moomin stories, which are fundamentally about nature, and treat everything its characters do with the same level of importance as a tree shedding its leaves. That is, very important and not important at all, all at once."
In this particular game, Snufkin will be exploring an open world, solving musical and environmental puzzles, doing side quests, and, the blurb says, ultimately chasing out the Park Keeper and his parks "with the help of your trusty harmonica, a bit of stealth, and the friends you'll meet along the way."
Snufkin: Melody Of Moominvalley is due to hit Steam in 2023. It'll also be on yet-unspecified consoles. It's made by Hyper Games, the Norwegian studio previously behind cooperative puzzle game Mørkredd.