The curious mix of binaural audio, survival horror and traditional adventuring in Somethin’ Else’s iOS adventure Papa Sangre creates an experience quite unlike anything else. At last week's Edinburgh Interactive it came to light that Apple encouraged the developer to sell the game at a premium price, saying it was "worth more than the price of [a] coffee." We sat down with company director of digital, Paul Bennun, to find out more.
Why did you choose to create the game for iOS, rather than any other format?
Firstly, we wanted to have a physical interface that was going to be as transparent as the audio interface, and a handset with a very simple control surface quickly vanishes – like a good game controller. Also, we’re doing true binaural processing of sound on the fly. Instead of having sound coming from five sources, we can simulate sound coming from 1,100 different sources. It’s frighteningly intense, but to do that you have to have headphones. We’d love to have it on Android as well, but Android’s media handling is quite primitive compared to iOS.
Its price is quite high for an unproven concept.
I think it’s really good value if you consider that we had to create an entirely new set of primary technologies to deliver it; effectively, we had to build our own Unreal engine. In some ways, it needed to be as technically advanced as Infinity Blade – it pushes the processor just as far.
Has Somethin’ Else’s experience in other media allowed you to approach game design differently?
Without any doubt. But good game design is good game design – it doesn’t matter who’s doing it. We’ve got experience of working on games such as Driver – we did all the scripts for the new Ubisoft game – and also games going right back to Buzz in the late ‘90s, but also theatre, radio and drama, too. We’ve got a different creative palette to many game developers, who look to TV and film and the way things are normally done for the aesthetic environments in which they set their games.
What can other developers learn from your approach?
One interesting thing about the game is that the tonal variation within it is very different to any other I’ve played. I wish there were more games that were attempting to explore different emotional registers, really. I very much admire games such as BioShock and Portal – and also Dead Space. Dead Space in particular has managed to explore how suspense and horror work in a really interesting way. I really wish to God that more developers would pay more attention to voice acting and scripting, because it’s still really shit in a lot of games. It adds so much, but you get these massively expensive games, where people are prepared to hire the Prague City Orchestra, but still think it’s acceptable to just knock up the dialogue. But it’s just not; it adds so much more to the intelligence and lasting value of the game.