Lucy recommends: RUNT
Welcome to the family.
Happy weekend, everyone!
I never want to wish my limited time on Earth away, but I have truly been counting the days to the release of this game. That's right, it's time to talk about RUNT: a gothic visual novel meets hidden object adventure game that features some of the best writing I've come across in quite some time. I played this demo back in February as a part of Next Fest, and it has stuck with me ever since.
I can't wait to tell you all about it, and I have a fascinating chat with its creators, so let's jump in!
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What is RUNT?
Your father was a cult leader. Someone dared desecrate his church.
You have five days to figure out who did it.
Your four elder brothers rule the town of Skipclaw with an iron fist. They have to, because the monsters outside its walls will hunt its inhabitants for sport if they don't. Part visual novel, part adventure game with light hidden object mechanics: make your rounds, interview the townsfolk, and find out what happened.
Hopefully you choose the right culprit.
Why it caught my eye
There is a lot to sink your teeth into with RUNT, and I'm not just talking about the unknowable monsters prowling its post-apocalypse setting.
At its core, it's a story about family, and all the complexity within it. Your father, the cult leader, gathered people to his side in their darkest moments, and offered them a way through. In the wake of his death and amidst the horrors of the night, your brothers do the same. They are a pillar of strength, but that doesn't make them the good guys. Tyrants, maybe.
Runt is the youngest in his family: stigmatized by the townsfolk simply for being a part of it, bullied by his brothers for existing at all. It's strange then, that he's the one tasked with figuring out who would dare mess with their father's church and threaten his sons. He approaches the task with unease, apprehensively quizzing his brothers on their movements, surely, they wouldn't have dared do it?, trying to use what little clout he has to get the townsfolk to answer his questions. It's a delicate dance to dig at the truth, and the pressure is compounded by the presence of one brother in particular.
Hunter.
The eldest, the tallest, the strongest. The most terrifying. Every scene with him feels like one wrong dialogue choice will tip him over the edge, and Runt will certainly be the one to feel the brunt of his fury. Hunter is an unknowable, looming presence, and one that haunts the game as you play it. Did he become this way because of his father, or in spite of him?
RUNT's writing plays with the interfamilial and town relationships masterfully. These characters are trapped in Skipclaw by this horrific shared circumstance, and it's fascinating to see how each of them responds to it. Do they keep their heads down and do their chores, or try and make the best of it by running schemes? Do they cope with humor, or do they withdraw? Do they trust or betray?
RUNT isn't just a game about cracking a case, it's a game about peeling back the layers of its characters, and find what shaped them into these messed up people. Monsters may lurk outside of Skipclaw's walls, but they lurk within them as well.
Try the demo out here!
A word from the developers...
I caught up with Yves Searle (co-director, artist, programmer, writer) and Soren Häxan (co-director, artist, writer) to chat about the inspiration behind RUNT, why a visual novel made the most sense for it, and the confronting, yet cathartic, nature of the game.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
LFG: What sparked the idea for RUNT?
Yves: I was watching 30 Days of Night and there's a scene in there where it's kind of a top-down view where they're going over the town as it's getting swarmed by vampires. At the time I was working on an idea of a Midwest emo-style game where you could get skill points for things like being a jock or a nerd or an emo or a loser, things like that. I kind of wanted to combine it into that singular idea of having a town that you could explore and defend and build up defenses.
It was going to be a little bit more Project Winter, more a top down 2.5D, but I don't really have the skills to make something like that. I wanted to make something that was a little bit more based in community and the connections that you see in these communities, especially in rural and suburban areas. I feel like not a lot of games explore that idea, especially not to the degree that we try and do where we show all these different perspectives that you see in these rural communities about things like religion and politics and community and what it means to trust someone.
So, that's kind of where it started. Soren helped flesh out the idea further with their own experiences growing up in rural California. I'm from England but I grew up in Minnesota, so I have a lot of ideas about corn fields and the flat lands and the dark winters and things like that. That's kind of where it all started.
Soren: I brought a lot of my own experiences like Yves said, growing up in a rural area and also in a very conservative family, like conservative fundamentalist Christian. So, I brought a lot of that to it. It's funny, I was thinking about past novels I'd written, [and in RUNT] Skipclaw is a walled town and there's a cult living in it. This is the second project that I've written with that theme because I had entirely forgotten I wrote a novel in high school. It was very bad as most teenage novels are.
But I'd already worked on the theme so it was really natural to come back to it as an adult. I did a lot of the photography for backgrounds in the game and it is all up close to where I live. So visually, the game is California, but it is supposed to be in the Midwest. There's an interesting kind of disconnect that makes it I think feel very unique.
LFG: Was it quite a confronting or a cathartic experience tackling these things you experienced growing up?
Soren: Very cathartic.
Yves: I think so.
Soren: I like writing from catharsis quite a lot. I think because it's kind of just more of a rare viewpoint to get an ex-Christian person tackling religion. I enjoyed it, as weird as that sounds.
Yves: For me, being an immigrant as well as being part of communities that are very considered as outsider. A lot of that kind of distant perspective and embodying that into a lot of these characters' perspectives, trying to see how they view not only themselves but how they relate to everybody else in this town. How they're different, how they're the same, and how even being 10 years into this survival situation, there's still tension and paranoia and this innate trust and distrust that kind of ebbs and flows with everything. Writing from that and seeing these different perspectives having lived in Minnesota and many different communities has been very interesting, very, I think somewhat cathartic.
LFG: You've done some interesting things like putting in hidden object and adventure game mechanics into the visual novel. How did you work to get that all to coalesce and why were they the right choices for the game?
Yves: We get this comment a lot that the game is a visual novel for people who don't like visual novels and that it has this very Western perspective and it has all these additional games and chores that you can do. One big thing that drew me and Soren together is that we really love Nancy Drew and old adventure games like Curse of Barrow Hill and things like that. We wanted to include those types of puzzles and those kinds of chores in the game so that it breaks up the pacing a bit, it introduces some element of gameplay that people can kind of really sink their teeth into. And some of these games and the mini games and chores you get to do get harder and harder, so you can really put your skills to the test and feel the pressure as the story builds in tension as well.
LFG: And when it comes to that pressure, the game features multiple endings. Are there some that feel like wish fulfillment? Are there some that are just the bleakest of the bleak? How wide-ranging are they going to be?
Yves: They're pretty bleak. When we were writing a bunch of these, there was a trick in that the way that the story is presented is that they had to fit certain ways in order to make sense with the flow of basically every possible player choice, so that was a really big complex thing we had to address when writing everything. It was a big design tenant that no matter what choices you make, you always got something very satisfying. Part of having a visual novel is having those somewhat cathartic, really dark moments so that you can feel even better about the good moments that you experience in the game and the "correct" choices you can make, so to speak.
LFG: Was it like a particular visual style and language you wanted to capture, or did it just come out as the story was progressing?
Soren: Yves also did a lot of the art and a lot of the writing, and so what I did was matching Yves' style. So I was just copying him and making sure our styles were as seamless as possible. A lot of it's kind of like photo realist or it's close to realistic.
Yves: Darkwood is a big inspiration. We love that game's style: it's so evocative and it sets the tone really well. And because we wanted RUNT to be so grounded, there's a lot of realism, hence the photos and the paintovers that we did, and a lot of photo bashing to make everything feel mostly real.
Note: Over email, Yves and Soren also wanted to give a shout out to their audio contractors,Taylor Shechet and Stephan Spies, who also helped in defining the tone of the game.
LFG: When it comes to the game's topics and themes, how bleak is too bleak ?
Soren: I don't know if there is a "too bleak." It gets pretty rough and pretty dark and I think that's kind of the point.
We're trying to introduce a lot of nuance and deal with a lot of really serious topics but I also tried to sneak in jokes wherever I could. We really didn't want to make anything edgy, nothing in the game is there for shock value. There's a lot of care, a lot of love, it's really dark. But yeah, there are jokes and there's the twins and they're very bubbly and…
Yves: Yeah, our little comedic twins. For bleakness, we don't want anything too dark. But the thing is that we really want to ground the reality of the situation and be like, this is just how people live and how they're surviving through this, and you can judge how they survive but this is how they have to do it. And Runt specifically as a character does a lot of trying to cope with this the fact that this is his life and trying to navigate that as best he can. We didn't want to make him too pitiable or making anything too bleak so it's just overwhelmingly edgy and grimdark. There's little spots of hope and we want people to find them and cling to them and use that to propel them through the story.
LFG: Who do you hope this game reaches and speaks to?
Yves: For us, we want it to reach communities that really are obsessed about characters because we are obsessed about our characters. We've seen people make accounts and reach out to us and say, "I've specifically made accounts because I love your characters and I want to reach out to you about your game and follow its progress," which is very moving because for both of us, I think we haven't had that kind of reaction to our art or anything that we've made so far except amongst friends and things like that.
So we hope it reaches people who do that, but I think on a larger narrative scale, we both have personally moved out of communities or experiences or places that just aren't fitting for us anymore. We want to impart that kind of wisdom of if it's bad, sometimes the bravest thing you can do is leave, and sometimes the more brave thing you can do is stay and try and make it work. There's no judgment on how any player would do that, but that's kind of what we went into the story with.
Do what you can to survive and find hope and light wherever you can.
Soren: Ideally, it gets to the people who kind of need this game or have been in similar situations or need a reminder, because it is a really dark game. It's about really fucked up stuff. But, the message really is: there is hope and you can get out of it, and if you have people around you that can help you get out of things, even if you can't help yourself kind of thing. So I hope it reaches the people who need to hear that and does some good.
Thanks so much for reading! I'll be back next week with my picks from the Six One Indie Demo Days showcase, as well as more recommendations for you to check out. Have a great weekend!