[INTERVIEW]: Nova-Box – The Team Behind Echoes

I recently got a hold of the men and women at Nova-Box, the team behind Echoes for an interview.

GameSkinny: For those of us that don’t know, tell us a little bit about Echoes.

Nova-Box: Echoes is an old-school investigation game. You play as Ricky Fox, a police detective investigating the death of his friend, Arthur Petrovski. When you set foot in the small and isolated town of Greenhearth, you quickly discover that things don’t add up and that something sinister is brewing behind the façade of pictorial charm of the secluded area.

In terms of gameplay, the game is a mix of a “choose your own adventure” novel and crime scene investigations where you search for clues in a scene. The originality of our approach is that each new game contains random elements that keeps it fresh for the players and makes it very difficult to follow a walkthrough. From the behaviour of the characters to the placement of the clues, one game can be very different from another. 

GS: You describe the game as a “film noir, comic book style adventure game” From what movies, comics or other sources of pop culture did you draw inspiration when writing the game?

NB: The main influences are quite obvious, I guess. Frederic Lignac, the writer, states the following : Twin Peaks, H.P. Lovecraft, Carpenter’s movies, especially In the Mouth of Madness, Naoki Urasawa’s graphic novel Monster, … Frederic does a lot of research when he starts a project, so it’s hard to be all inclusive. I think there’s some very French influences too, from “l’école franco-belge” (Franco-Belgian comics) that are quite pervasive here (every child grow up with them) to some French “polars”. The late works of Jean-Pierre Melville, such as Le Cercle Rouge come to mind, as well as Jean-Christophe Grangé’s book Les Rivières Pourpres (The Crimson Rivers) for a more contemporary influence.

GS: From where did you draw inspiration in regard to the visuals?

NB: Florian Ponty, our artist, loves the work of Alfons Mucha, an Art Nouveau painter. I think that it shows in the character design. We are also all fans of the work of Frank Miller, notably the bold graphic choices he made for Sin City, with these very contrasty black and whites. We used it as a reference for our graphic design, but in much more subdued way.

GS: I’m a huge film noir fan, but I also saw some influences from other appendages of pop culture. Did shows like Twin Peaks influence your process at all?

NB: This TV show is a major milestone in recent pop culture history, I think everyone can agree on that. We adopted the same narrative style, with an episodic structure. The setting and premisses are quite similar, too. We’re dealing with the aftermath of a brutal death in a small isolated town, indeed, but as the story develops, the originality of our narrative will become quite obvious. The players may have to brace themselves for some serious plot twists!

GS: Tell me a little bit about what is coming up in the future of Echoes (spoiler free of course). When can we expect to see future episodes?

NB:We’re currently porting the game for PC/Mac. Fréderic Lignac, has already begun to write the second episode, while we’re considering different options to fund further development of the project. Our goal is to publish 4 or 5 episodes to complete Ricky Fox’s story arc, which is the top of the iceberg of what we have in mind. We hope that by then we would have garnered enough of the gaming community interest to be able develop a more ambitious game, set in the same universe.

Unfortunately, I can’t give any release window for any of this, we’re working hard on this project, but we’re a small independent company, so we can’t commit 100% of our time and resources on the game.

GS: Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us.

Well there you have it folks. You can get Echoes on the iTunes App Store for $2.99. Though if you read my review, you may want to think twice.