New times.

If we manage to release Bientôt l’été in the fall, it will have been three years since we last published a desktop game. I’m very curious about how it will be received.

A lot of things seem to have changed in videogames since The Endless Forest, The Graveyard, The Path and Fatale. I doubt if the compromises and references we made in the latter two would still make sense today. And that was only three years ago.

The recent success of Journey and Dear Esther shows that pure interactivity is now acceptable in videogames. I realize that both owe some of their success to the way in which they remain loyal to videogames but there is no conventional gameplay to speak of in either. Their form and structure was built to support the content they present. This is good design. This is how to deal with a medium. But three years ago such an approach was considered blasphemous.

Bientôt l’été goes a few steps further again, so I don’t have any illusions about similar mass appeal. But still, it will be interesting to release something in a world that is not aggressively hostile towards the idea of using videogames for artistic expression without relying on the comforting conventions of rules and rewards.