Broken Mirror Games is barely a year old, but the Bloober Team publishing division has already managed the once unthinkable. Onyx: The Dark Grip is set to be one of the first Nintendo-exclusive horror games in over a decade, proving that the Nintendo Switch 2 really is a console for all - even us horror hounds.
Sitting down with Bloober Team CEO Piotr Babieno and Broken Mirror's new executive director Tymon Smektała, I have just one question. How on Earth did they pull off getting a game like this past Nintendo?
Bloober Team lead talks remaking Silent Hill 2 and "mastering the art of horror"
Smektała might be new to Broken Mirror, but after 13 years at Techland and having gotten to know him well over his last three as Dying Light franchise director, take it from me: the guy really knows, loves, lives, and breathes his horror. Which means he's keenly aware that Onyx: The Dark Grip being a Switch 2-exclusive, handheld-only experience is a very, very big deal."Nintendo doesn't work with just anyone," Smektała says. "Generally, Japanese companies are companies that you have to build trust with, and you have to prove that you are worthy of that trust. The fact that we have managed to convince Nintendo to to support a game like this – to feature it in a Nintendo Direct and allow us to make that game for Nintendo Switch as an exclusive – speaks of the fact that Bloober Team is being noticed and realized and validated as the people to go to when it comes to horror." He's right on the money. Few studios have pulled off a reputational 180 as well as Bloober Team. The studio had been around for years, but Silent Hill 2 Remake was the catalyst for that success. The gorgeously faithful yet beautifully modernized survival horror was met with staggering praise, impressing even those who balked when Konami first revealed the Polish studio's involvement, to become one of the most important remakes in the genre to-date. For all the studio's slip ups in the past, the proof was there on-screen: Konami was right to trust Bloober Team, and now, so do we all.But Konami's seal of approval seemed to extend beyond the publisher, bleeding into the Japanese market itself. Onyx: The Dark Grip is to be one of the first third-party Nintendo-exclusive horror games since 2014, hot on the heels of this month's asymmetrical co-op Beyond the Dark: Nightwatch.
Developed by Bloober Team, published in-house by Broken Mirror, and built entirely for the Switch 2's handheld mode, stunning 2.5D psych-horror Onyx casts the player as both a God and the person possessed by it. "The reason we are doing this for Nintendo is because I'm a Nintendo fan," Babieno grins, "so I'm making my dreams come true in some way."
But Sincere as Babieno is about his love for Nintendo systems, I suspect there's more to the deal than that. Smektała reaffirms my hunch when I ask about which horror niches the pair would like to see make a resurgence. Another Broken Mirror-published game, Saw: Genesis, fulfils one of them – social horror in the vein of Repo and Lethal Company, harnessing "the power of technology, the power of online, the power of connecting people" to deliver "a game experience that will try to play with social interactions." The other element is the interactive experience of a game itself.
"I think it would be very very interesting to find ways to trick the player, make him doubt what he's seeing on screen, make him doubt how he interacts with the device as we do with Onyx: The Dark Grip," says Smektała. "Kind of by accident, the games that we have already announced [at Broken Mirror Games] are doing that already."
Nintendo doesn't work with just anyone
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.gamesradar.com/games/horror/bloober-teams-switch-2-exclusive-heralds-amazing-times-of-gamecube-horror-thanks-to-japanese-approach-to-business
