Clear obscure: shipping 33 is my favorite game of the year so far, with an exhilarating battle system, excellent exploration and a haunting soundtrack. But I am not the only one to love it: the game has become a huge success, with more than 2 million copies sold only 12 days after its release in late April. “It seems very surreal,” explains Guillaume Broche, CEO and creative director of Sandfall Interactive.
According to Pin, the game works “well beyond expectations” and that the team did not expect it to “explode” as quickly as it did. “We are still in denial, basically,” he says. The main writer Jennifer Svedberg-Yen adds: “I’m going to wake up tomorrow and it’s a joke, right?”
An important part of Shipping 33Success is its captivating story. It brought me back to the game at all times that I could just see what happened afterwards. The opening strikes you with a Gutpunch. Play like Gustave, expressed by DaredevilCharlie Cox, you discover the tragic circumstances of the world, his characters and the annual “scrub” which makes everyone disappear in a certain age in a wave of petals when a giant called the painses painted a new lower number on a giant monolith.
Gustave is one of the next shipments who will perform and try to defeat the Bread, and this team also includes Maelle, a teenager for whom he is responsible. But he also loses an ex, Sophie, with an exfoliation after the painper painted a 33.
It is a powerful and emotional opening, and it interested me Shipping 33 right away. But there was a key scene later that changed the story of the good game to great for me – and I was able to talk to Brocke and Svedberg -Yen on this.
Spoilers to come. Do not scroll this image unless you wanted to read a major development of the plot.
If you have chosen to continue scrolling, the moment I speak is at the end of Act 1.
The mysterious man with white hair who massacred a large part of the expedition 33 earlier in history appears after an intense boss fight. Without warning, the man stabbed Gustave with a gigantic sword, and after a brief battle, stab him again, killing him – and very in front of Maelle, who is trapped in a dome of magic energy which makes his helpless.
When it happened in my game, my jaw was on the ground. Shipping 33 Advance until now depicts Gustave as the protagonist, and I thought he had the armor of the plot to go to the end so that he could be closed on the loss of Sophie. (Heck, they launched Charlie Cox, who also plays a Marvel superhero, to express it!) But a few hours after the opening of the game, Gustave was gone.
“This is where the story should go,” says Svedberg-Yen. For the story and the themes that the team opted: “This is the most organic.”
“One of the main themes in history is very obviously sorrow,” explains Broche. In order to make a game on sorrow feel true, the team wanted the players “pass through the horror that the characters go through,” he adds. “It was simply logical to inflict pain on the player as strongly as the characters.”
Pin says that playing as the character creates a deep link and an attachment. “Losing this is the hole that the characters in the game are essentially experiencing each year with the scrub, and it is something here that seemed true for the game and the story.”
The scene is brilliantly designed to give death an impact. After the fight of the boss and before the appearance of the man with white hair, I had relaxed – I told myself that I would have a pretty celebration kinematics before moving on to the following thing. But the surprise of what happened next and the powerful performances of the actors in the capture of movement and the actors of the voice made the scene memorable and powerful.
I was particularly struck by the murder: after the man with white hair stabbed Gustave, the game goes slowed down to stop at that time, on the horror of Maelle, and on the Gustave armbands sporting “33”, that Sophie took it shortly before she Gomense.
For me, it seemed to recall the death of Aerith Final Fantasy VIIBut brooch and Svedberg-Yen say it was not intentional. “If people find similarities, it is not really aware of us,” explains Broche. (Svedberg-Yen said she hadn’t really played FF7So I apologized for having spoiled the death of Aerith.)
Gustave’s latest words are also powerful: “For those who come after, right?” It is a currency used by expeditioners to recognize the goal and futility of their mission, and throughout act one, it becomes something of a slogan for Gustave. But in the moments before the coup to kill, he seems to know what is coming, and he says it by giving a heartbreaking look to Maelle – who will have to attack herself with everything that comes after – before making his last attack. “That’s all his character,” said brooch about the line.
The motto itself also has a broader meaning. “We really wanted to face the idea that they are part of a wider tradition, that they are an expedition to a chain,” explains Svedberg-Yen. “So we really wanted to find a way to summarize this.”
Like the rest of Shipping 33The most impactful moments, which makes the scene work is a combination of elements – writing, performance, music and more – which merge together to create moments that I cannot stop thinking, even when they do not present a dramatic and unexpected death. “When we think of the narration, all the teams together – all this package – who really made life,” explains Svedberg -Yen.
