Every point-and-click adventure teaches players the same reflex: pick up the object, hold it, wait for the room where it belongs. The inventory is so foundational to the genre that it rarely gets treated as a design choice at all — it reads as the floor the genre stands on. Crushed in Time, the new release from Draw Me A Pixel (the team behind There Is No Game), removes that floor. Not as a stunt, but as a consequence of its premise: the protagonist is pulled inside a piece of software and stops playing the game in any conventional sense. He’s trapped in it.

Associate Producer Freddi Malavasi put the resulting problem plainly in an interview: building a point-and-click without an inventory. That sentence is easy to read past. It shouldn’t be. It’s the hinge the entire design pivots on.

Constraint first, invention second

The convenient story about Crushed in Time is that it’s “a game about making games” — meta by design, clever by association. That framing isn’t wrong, but it skips the more useful question: which came first, the meta concept or the mechanical gap it created?

The design suggests that the gap came first. Once the premise traps its protagonist inside software with no access to normal controls, carrying objects between rooms stops being an option — the game is forced to invent a different grammar of interaction. Its answer is to make the world itself elastic: stretchable, foldable, bendable enough to move a jar of honey through a dumbwaiter without ever letting the player hold it. That’s not a replacement inventory system. It’s a different verb entirely: instead of carry, the player learns to distort.

That single substitution is the real subject of this game. Removing an object from the interface is a small move. Replacing the player’s core verb is not. Everything Crushed in Time does downstream of that — the puzzle logic, the pacing, the sense that the world itself is negotiable rather than fixed — follows from that one swap.

Development as backdrop, not subject

The game moves players through recognizable stages of a production cycle — prototyping, beta, release — which invites an obvious risk: alienating anyone who’s never opened a game engine. It sidesteps that risk by simplifying the technical scenery while keeping the interactive layer legible.

But the telling part isn’t the simplification itself — it’s what that choice implies about intent. Development functions here as scenery, not subject. The emotional core sits closer to friendship and problem-solving than to a lecture on engines; the production stages supply vocabulary, not the message.

That distinction separates this game from a lot of dev-humor that trades in in-jokes for an audience of developers. Rather than wink at people who’ve shipped a game, it borrows the shape of shipping a game to tell a story that would work in almost any other setting.

What the removal leaves behind

The most interesting thing about this game sits less in what it adds to the point-and-click formula — the elasticity, the software-as-setting, the jumps between production phases — and more in what it subtracted first. Pull the inventory out of a point-and-click and something has to fill that space. Here, what filled it was stranger and more load-bearing than the piece that went missing.

Every point-and-click assumes its inventory without ever arguing for it. Crushed in Time forces the argument into the open by refusing the assumption — and that’s the real payoff here, more than any specific puzzle solution the elasticity produces. What replaces the inventory matters less than the fact that the game makes us notice it was ever there.

Addicional details on Crushed in Time:

Launched June 10th 2026

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Into the Unwell announces itself as chaos. A rubber-hose third-person roguelite about alcoholics, depressives, and a heavily medicated cat, fighting through a world that mirrors their own unwellness back at them — it’s the kind of premise that could collapse into either edgy provocation or shapeless slapstick. Talking to Mårten Stockhaus, co-founder and creative director at She Was Such a Good Horse, a different shape emerges, one that shows up again and again under different names: a weapon, a button, a piece of UI. Something gets built loosely, gets watched, gets restrained, and only after the restraint holds does the studio decide what it means. Call it containment before identity. It’s not a slogan the studio would use about itself — Stockhaus never names it — but it’s the gesture that recurs across nearly every system he describes, and it’s worth tracking as a single thread rather than four separate anecdotes.

The premise that arrives before its own justification

“Power from powerlessness” is not a new pitch. Darkest Dungeon turns stress and fear into a resource to be managed rather than eliminated; Hades treats grief and family dysfunction as the engine of its loop rather than an obstacle to it; Hellblade folds psychosis directly into how the player perceives the game’s space. Into the Unwell sits in that lineage, but pushes further into discomfort by naming addiction and depression specifically, and by declining to soften the choice with metaphor — the cat is medicated, the heroes are drunks, full stop.

What’s notable is how little appetite Stockhaus has for examining where that choice came from. The idea arrived, by his account, “a little too easy and too early,” over beers, and his response to being asked why is to wave the question off: “it’s better not to speculate too much.” Read one way, that’s a creative director declining to over-intellectualize an instinct that worked. Read another way, it’s the premise undergoing the same containment-before-identity logic as everything else in this interview — except here the thing being contained isn’t a mechanic, it’s the studio’s own account of its motives. The idea is allowed to exist and produce results before anyone is asked to justify it.

Where the thesis gets more concrete is the smallest example offered: Charcat, the depressed house cat whose “runny eyes and split color say so much using so little.” That’s not a thematic claim so much as a legibility claim — vulnerability, to function as a game asset rather than a mood board entry, has to be readable at a glance, the way an attack telegraph or a status icon is readable at a glance. It’s the first place the abstract premise gets a body.

A weapon, a button, and the model that connects them

The pattern is most visible — and most useful as a model — in two systems Stockhaus describes from very different angles: a weapon and a button.

The ice cream weapon wasn’t designed to be charming and then mechanically realized; it was built to fill a gap in playstyle, and its temperament — “charming,” “charisma and grace” — was read off the finished model afterward, the way you’d describe a stranger’s face before you’d spoken to them. The “lobotomised lollipop” presumably went through something similar, though its name carries a sharper, more clinical edge than “charming” does, and the interview never quite reconciles that gap between the studio’s most affectionate weapon and its most unsettling one. Worth sitting with rather than smoothing over: a game built on vulnerability-as-power keeps producing objects that are simultaneously cute and a little disturbing, and the studio doesn’t appear to be choosing one register over the other so much as letting both stand, uncontained, side by side.

The kick mechanic tells the same story with sharper edges, and it’s the clearest single proof of the pattern in the whole interview. It started loose — a dedicated button to punt enemies into hazards, unrestricted. The team narrowed it, gating it behind a stun requirement. Only then did it expand back outward: status effects on the kick, additional charges, eventually entire builds organized around it. Open, restrict, then re-expand along a controlled axis. That sequence is the clearest articulation of containment before identity anywhere in the conversation — not because the kick is more important than the rubber-hose aesthetic or the co-op question, but because it’s the one system where the studio’s own account makes the mechanism visible step by step. Everything else in this piece is, in effect, a variation read through that same three-beat structure: open, restrain, let meaning accrue inside the restraint.

The legibility work Stockhaus describes for combat follows an identical logic, applied to noise instead of mechanics: identify whatever’s creating the worst visual clutter, then ask whether it’s earning its place. “We do like our drunken and chaotic brawls, but as everyone knows, within reason,” he says, and the qualifier is the whole sentence’s argument — what reads on screen as rubber-hose anarchy is the output of a studio repeatedly deciding what to cut. None of these systems were planned end to end on paper. They were grown, watched, and pruned, the identity assigned only once the containment was already in place.

Where the language stops being observable

The progression answer breaks the pattern, and the break is more useful than a clean fit would have been. Stockhaus describes three categories of upgrade — power, playstyle, feel — plus character-and-weapon-specific talents, plus run-to-run randomness. Every other system in this interview arrives with a named, inspectable artifact: the ice cream weapon, the kick button, Charcat. The progression answer arrives with none. No specific upgrade is named, no example of a “feel” change that isn’t also a power change, no talent pairing offered as evidence that two characters actually diverge rather than look different while playing the same.

That gap is the tell. Everywhere else, Stockhaus’s claims are observable — they point at a built thing and let the thing carry the argument. Here, the claim is declarative: a description of intent with nothing underneath it to verify against. That shift, from observable to declarative, is the single clearest signal in the interview of where containment hasn’t happened yet, or hasn’t happened in a way the studio is ready to show. It doesn’t mean the progression system lacks the variety being claimed for it. It means this is the one place where the interview asks to be taken on faith rather than shown the mechanism, and the asymmetry with the rest of the conversation is loud enough to flag rather than smooth over.

The question answered sideways

Asked directly whether three-player co-op reinforces or dilutes the game’s “inner demons” framing, Stockhaus answers a social question instead of the mechanical one — hoping multiplayer becomes a low-stakes way for friends to “casually start talking about” addiction and mental health. Generous, plausible, and not a description of what co-op does to the system. Three players each embodying a different flaw, coordinating to survive, is a structurally different claim than one player alone with a single flaw: it would mean vulnerability becomes collectively useful rather than privately so, a stronger thesis than the solo version if the mechanics back it up. Or co-op flattens the premise into ordinary cooperative competence — three classes doing damage together, with addiction and depression reduced to skins that would read identically on any other set of traits. Containment before identity would predict the studio hasn’t fully decided yet, that the social shape of co-op is still loose and the meaning is waiting to be read off it later, the same way the ice cream weapon’s charm was read off its finished model rather than planned in advance.

The “Unwell Nation” aside — players forming an in-joke government run by whichever character is the resident drunk — is the studio’s own unprompted image of where shared play naturally goes, and it’s worth taking at face value rather than as a throwaway. It’s chaotic and communal, and it is not a confrontation with anything. If that’s the genuine attractor state of co-op, the multiplayer mode is heading toward shared absurdity rather than shared catharsis — not a flaw, but a different game than the solo framing describes, and one whose containment, on this evidence, hasn’t closed yet. Stockhaus ends by wondering whether the characters ever get well, hoping the player does. The more interesting unanswered question by that point isn’t whether they get well — it’s whether three of them trying to get well together changes what “getting well” means inside this system at all, and that’s the one piece of containment this interview leaves entirely open.

Additional details on Into the Unwell:

Scheduled for release in 2027

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The Demon That No Longer Fit

Before it was called KUROHI, the game didn’t have that name at all. The main character was someone else entirely — “a cute little demon,” as the creator puts it. The horns stayed. Almost everything else changed. Not because a plan failed, but because as the mechanics and the world around it took shape, that character stopped fitting the game it was becoming.

This isn’t an isolated turn. Before KUROHI, the creator had already worked on two NES projects — A Winner Is You and You Are Error — alongside names like Shiru and RetroUSB. The question behind those projects was always the same: how far can this old hardware be pushed? KUROHI asks a more ambitious version of that question — not just what the console can do, but what kind of adventure can fit inside it. And it was exactly that ambition that made the original character too small for what was being built.

So the story of KUROHI doesn't start with a fixed idea carried out to completion. It starts with an idea that changed repeatedly as the game around it took shape.

The Skeleton That Never Changed

The core never changed: KUROHI was born, and remains, a platforming metroidvania. That part was settled from the start, and it was designed with two kinds of players in mind from day one — those who want to move through a stage quickly, by a more direct route, and those who’d rather explore every corner at their own pace. That duality was never treated as a difficulty slider; it’s stitched into the layout of the levels themselves.

Everything else grew out of that skeleton — not for variety’s sake, but because the world, as it expanded, started asking for other ways to move through it. The hub town, the NPCs, the shop, the treasure chests didn’t arrive as a checklist of features. They arrived because the creator felt the game needed places where a player could slow down, talk to someone, and come back later with a new ability to finally reach a corner that had seemed impossible — a double jump or wall climb that quite literally reopens parts of the map already visited. Behind every new system sits the same practical question: what does the player need to feel right now, after that last challenge?

Transitions as Contract

The space shooter sections didn’t show up because “a shooter would be cool.” They arrived as a breather after harder platforming stretches — a shift in rhythm in the middle of the tension, with controls deliberately simplified so the player doesn’t get lost in the switch. But even there, the creator refused to let the transition land without a reason. Instead of simply dropping the player into another genre, he decided NPCs would justify the change themselves: maybe a boss is stronger fighting in the sky, so KUROHI has to go up. It’s a small, almost invisible decision — but it’s the kind of decision that separates a game that feels like four games stitched together from one that feels like a single world with different moods.

The point-and-click sections came later, and weren’t even part of the original plan — they arrived as a Kickstarter stretch goal. Even so, the creator didn’t scatter them randomly across the hub. He reserved them for objects that already seemed to ask for a closer look just by being there: a bookshelf, a barrel, a well. Where to place them wasn’t an aesthetic call — it was another version of the same rule running through the rest of the game: nothing gets in just because it can.

That rule may be the most repeated decision across the whole interview, in different forms: every genre shift needs a reason to exist at that exact moment, or it doesn’t happen. It’s not an abstract design principle — it’s a way of protecting the game from the thing that threatens it most: looking like a pile of ideas instead of one adventure.

The Hardware as Silent Partner

Not every decision came from free choice. The Game Boy Color has a small screen, a limited palette, tight memory — and that, more than any abstract design principle, is what forced most of the game’s fine-tuning. The creator worked in GB Studio, an engine with solid documentation and an active community, but that didn’t make the decisions automatic: every animation, every sprite, every sound effect had to be weighed against how little space was available, both on the cartridge and on the screen itself.

Character speed, for instance, had to be corrected more than once: move too fast, and the player’s reaction window shrinks on an already small screen, turning a simple crossing into an obstacle. The same went for the jump arc — too floaty, and the platforming loses precision; too stiff, and the game loses its flow. The Speed Boots, which the player can buy later, sounded like a simple idea — move faster — until it became clear that parts of the level had been balanced around slower movement, forcing a re-tuning of the spacing between ledges. None of this was imagined all at once. It was corrected, piece by piece, against the concrete resistance of the hardware.

The clearest example of this logic didn’t come from a design choice at all — it came from a bug. For some reason, room size was interfering with exactly where the character respawned after dying, even with the right coordinates set. The technical fix was to build small, dedicated rooms just for save points. That fix, meant to solve a code problem, ended up producing a feeling the creator himself compares to Resident Evil’s “safe rooms”: you step in, you feel safe, you catch your breath, you head back out into danger. A glitch became atmosphere. Nobody planned that moment of relief — it appeared because a bug forced a decision, and that decision, without anyone intending it, became part of the game’s identity.

Even the chibi, anime-inspired look of the main character isn’t an isolated aesthetic choice. It’s a direct answer to the size of the screen: a style expressive enough without demanding excessive detail — exactly the kind of trade-off the Game Boy Color rewards.

There’s something personal in all this, without needing to turn it into a heroic portrait: the creator admits, plainly, that he likes working this way. “Maybe it’s just me, but I genuinely thrive within limitations. I love having to think differently.” It’s not a sacrifice accepted in the name of a retro game. It’s how he prefers to work. Seen from this angle, KUROHI isn’t just a game designed for the Game Boy Color — it’s the result of someone who keeps choosing to let a system with few options decide for him, and then builds from whatever’s left.

The Player as Compass

The same logic shows up in how the game handles freedom and direction. The hub town plays a central role here too: it’s where the player comes back to talk to NPCs, buy upgrades, and pick up pieces of the story. One particular NPC holds more direct hints about where to go next — but only for players who talk to them more than once. That’s a deliberate choice: the creator wanted to reward engagement with the world without punishing players who’d rather push forward alone. Inside the stages themselves, a map accessible by pressing Start serves the same role as a safety net, without making the path linear.

Asked which part of the game took the most iteration, the answer wasn’t a specific system, but the overall feel of playing: the weight of the jump, the speed of movement, and above all the transitions between play styles. As the creator puts it himself, “if the mechanics don’t feel right, the game is cooked” — and everything else was tuned around that certainty. There’s a moment, by his own account, when the game finally found its identity: not when one single piece became perfect, but when the character, the music, and the different play styles started working together — leaving the hub, moving through a platforming stage, suddenly hitting a fight in the sky, and coming back to the hub, without any of it feeling like it belonged to a different game. Only then did the project stop feeling like a collection of ideas and start feeling, finally, like KUROHI.

What’s Left When a Game Can No Longer Be Anything Else

That’s probably why the character who started out as “a cute little demon” stopped making sense. A vague concept holds up as long as the game around it is vague too. But as each system locked into place — the pacing, the transitions, the save rooms, the hub town — the room for the character to keep being anything in particular closed in with it. KUROHI’s name, identity, and personality didn’t arrive first. They arrived later, like the last piece slotting into a puzzle that already had almost everything else in place.

The creator himself describes this as a balance between nostalgia and something new: a game that feels like it belongs to an older era, but moves and talks like something from now — the NPCs, for instance, carry a certain wit and slang that wouldn’t feel out of place in a conversation today. It’s not pure nostalgia, and it’s not pure reinvention either. It’s the same logic of accumulated decisions, applied to tone instead of mechanics.

Near the end of the interview, the creator pauses, briefly, to mention Yoshihisa Kishimoto, creator of Double Dragon and the Kunio-kun series, who passed away recently. It isn’t a decorative tribute: it’s an acknowledgment that the impulse to combine combat, progression, and RPG structure into one thing had already been done, decades earlier, by someone he deeply admires. And when asked what he hopes players take away from KUROHI, the answer isn’t about mechanics. It’s about a character, a world, an NPC’s joke, a track that sticks in your head — the same kind of thing he took, himself, from the games he played as a kid.

About what comes next, the creator stays brief: there’s already another Game Boy Color project in mind, and a hope of one day seeing KUROHI reach the eShop and the PlayStation Store. But that’s a conversation for later. For now, what matters is this version — shaped not by a perfect original vision, but by hundreds of small corrections that, together, stopped being able to be anything else.

Maybe that’s the fairest way to read this interview: not as the account of someone who had a vision and carried it out point by point, but as the account of someone who kept letting a game decide itself — decision by decision, constraint by constraint — until exactly one thing was left. And only that.

Additional details on KUROHI:

Scheduled for release in 2026

Site | Kickstarter | Bluesky

What if a 3D platformer trusted the jump again?

Before skill trees, bloated progression systems, or the near-compulsive need to turn every protagonist into a fighter, the 3D platformer lived (or died) by how a virtual body moved through space. Running, calculating distances, missing a jump by a few inches, correcting mid-air: for a significant stretch of the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 era, there was an almost naïve but powerful confidence in the idea that traversing a world could be mechanic enough.

Then the genre grew. It mixed with other languages, sought maturity through heavier combat, denser systems, and structures that often confused evolution with accumulation. Simplicity didn’t disappear, but it stopped occupying the centre — as if moving with precision, on its own, no longer sufficed.

BOBO AND THE CHEST OF NIGHTMARES is born from that absence. David Ho isn’t simply recovering references from a specific generation; he’s responding to a deeper shift in how 3D platformers are designed. Where so many games expanded by adding layers, it returns to a more elementary question: can movement, fluidity, and spatial design sustain a game on their own? In a present frequently seduced by excess, that choice isn’t merely stylistic. It’s a design bet; and perhaps a small act of resistance.

When the spectacle stopped being enough

To understand that bet, it helps to go back to the moment the genre began to change.

The 3D platformers of the PS1/N64 era weren’t simple by aesthetic principle; they were simple, in part, because three-dimensional space was still novel enough to carry the experience. Moving a body through a world that expanded in every direction was, in itself, discovery. The jump didn’t need to compete with combat systems or progression trees because three-dimensionality itself was the spectacle.

When that spectacle stopped being new, the genre needed to reinvent itself — and the dominant answer was to add. Few examples illustrate that shift more cleanly than the transition from Jak and Daxter to Jak II. The first game, from Naughty Dog, centred on traversal: explore, move fluidly, master space. The second radically expanded the project’s scope — open world, vehicles, weapons, mission systems, darker tone. Nobody was betrayed: the same team, making different choices, responding to what they read as the demands of a new moment. But movement stopped being the argument. It became one component among many.

That shift — from movement as end to movement as means — is the context in which David Ho’s project comes into focus.

The diagnosis and the bet

Ho’s diagnosis of the genre doesn’t hide its angle: “modern platformers have lost their way a little by trying to be too much — they rely too heavily on complex combat and RPG systems, a trend that began with the PS2 generation when the industry felt that the average age of the player was increasing and needed more aggression and complexity to sell.”

His response is symmetrical: instead of adding, strip back deliberately until what remains is, for him, essential. “The design challenge,” he says, “is to prove that the satisfaction of navigating a well-designed 3D space is mechanic enough to sustain a game.” That’s the project’s central bet — and it’s a genuine one, because it has a binary outcome: either it works, or it doesn’t.

Movement as language

That bet starts with how Bobo moves. Ho defines the feeling of movement through what he calls the inertia/control problem: “Bobo needs to have weight so that the jump feels real, but the player needs to be able to correct their trajectory in the air instantly.” To make that work in practice, the game uses mechanisms like coyote time and jump buffering — technical solutions in service of a promise: that mistakes are readable, that failure lands on the player and not on imprecise controls.

The goal, Ho says, was to “turn movement into a language”: the double jump, wall jump, and glide not as isolated actions, but as tools of rhythmic expression. Levels follow that logic — designed to be read visually, inviting players to trace routes before executing them, without tutorials that get in the way. “If Bobo has elite mobility, the level can’t be a corridor; it has to be a structure where the player looks at a high point and mentally traces an acrobatic route to get there.”

The vocabulary is ambitious. Whether the execution holds it is another matter.

Where philosophy meets its limits

Here the picture gets more complex — and more honest.

Ho frames the decision to keep combat light and secondary as a philosophical choice: in a genre dominated by combat systems, restraint would itself be a design position. But he adds something that reframes it: “introducing a deep combat system would require me to build an entire system, and we can’t forget that the game is developed mostly by one person.”

In BOBO AND THE CHEST OF NIGHTMARES, restraint is both aesthetic conviction and production pragmatism. There’s no reason those two things should be mutually exclusive — and there’s something more truthful, not less, in a project that acknowledges its limits without dressing them up as virtue. But the ambiguity is real, and perhaps not unique to this game: it runs through the contemporary indie project, where necessity and vision rarely arrive separately, and where telling them apart may ultimately be the wrong question.

Aesthetics as necessity

There’s a detail in my conversation with Ho that deserves attention. When asked about the game’s aesthetic identity — the contrast between a court jester and a nightmare world — his answer doesn’t begin with vision. It begins with a practical problem: “initially it looked too similar aesthetically to the PlayStation One game Jinx.” The solution was a visual contrast strong enough to give the project its own identity. The aesthetic didn’t emerge from a narrative — it emerged from a need to differentiate.

Ho is direct about the implications: “it was an aesthetic and narrative decision; at the level of gameplay mechanics, the focus remained unchanged.” What that reveals is telling: BOBO wants to recover mechanical purity, but needs visual strangeness to survive in a market where attention is scarce. The aesthetic identity — jester against nightmares, joy against oppression — may be the most immediately recognisable thing about the project. Whether that visual identity precedes, or accompanies, the systemic identity Ho is trying to build is a question the finished game will have to answer.

The question that remains

At the end of the conversation, when asked whether BOBO is closer to recovering the classics or reinterpreting them, Ho answers plainly: “I would say that, at this point, it’s an attempt.” The game is mid-development. The players’ response is still to come.

It’s an honest answer — and probably the right one. Because the most interesting question BOBO AND THE CHEST OF NIGHTMARES raises isn’t whether it will be good or bad, well-executed or not. It’s whether its design philosophy still has a place in a present obsessed with systemic expansion. Whether the project’s central argument — that movement, fluidity, and spatial design can sustain a game on their own — proves true in actual play.

There was a moment when jumping was enough. Whether it will be enough again, only the finished game can say.

Additional details on BOBO AND THE CHEST OF NIGHTMARES:

Scheduled for release in October 2026

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The World That Came First

Septurian Might didn’t begin as a game. It began as a question about civilizations.

Designer Aman Trivedi conceived a planet called Septura where intellect functions as currency — not as metaphor, but as infrastructure. An entire society organised around the acquisition, exchange and accumulation of intelligence. The question driving the project was one he still seems to be working through: “What happens when an entire civilization operates on superhuman intelligence?”

An answer started forming as a novel. Then, during the writing process, a second question emerged and changed everything: “What does it feel like to take intelligence from something else?”

This is an unusual starting point for a videogame. The world existed before the systems. The philosophical premise came before the mechanics. The design problem — how to make the idea of stealing or absorbing intellect playable — wasn't born from a mechanic looking for context. It emerged from an attempt to translate an idea from one medium into another.

Everything in Service of the Narrative

The mechanic at the centre of Septurian Might went through several versions. There was a turn-based phase where stealing intellect triggered a psychological puzzle sequence — “the idea was to represent outsmarting an opponent rather than overpowering them.” Then a chess-like system. Neither survived.

What remained was an insight that clarifies the problem Trivedi was trying to solve: “Intelligence as a concept is abstract, and even in real life we don’t have a single clear definition for it. But abilities are tangible.” Rather than representing intellect as a number subtracted from an enemy, the game represents it as what makes each enemy distinct. Stealing intelligence is no longer about taking a number — it becomes “taking what makes a being unique and making it your own.” At that point, Trivedi says, “it stopped feeling like a gameplay system layered on top of the story, and started feeling like a direct expression of it.”

The distinction seems small but shapes almost everything downstream. It determines what progression means. What enemies mean. What combat means in a game built around a single governing idea: “Everything in the game exists to serve the narrative.”

This isn’t a vague claim about narrative importance. It’s a design philosophy with practical consequences. “Whether it’s combat, a puzzle, a cutscene, or a side quest, it isn’t there just for variety. It has a purpose within the story.” Cutscenes cannot be skipped — “you can’t skip cutscenes, and you can’t bypass major story beats” — a deliberate decision, made with full awareness of the friction it creates.

It’s an authorial position. It’s also a risky one.

Trivedi admits he has skipped cutscenes himself, just to get back to playing. He knows what he’s asking. He’s asking for attention at precisely the moment a player might want something else. The solution he’s working toward is building those moments well enough that they become “a natural continuation of the experience” rather than an interruption of it — easier to articulate as a principle than to guarantee in practice, particularly in a game still in development.

Whether it’s possible to sustain that coherence across a game with over a hundred abilities, branching choices, and multiple endings is a question the finished game will have to answer. For now, what exists is the intention, and the architecture being built around it.

A World the Creator Questions

The most interesting answer in the interview isn’t about mechanics. It’s about Trivedi’s relationship with the world he built.

At a certain point, after describing how his convictions found their way into the work — “when you’re honest as a writer, your beliefs inevitably find their way into your work” — he admits something unusual for a development interview: “my own perspective ended up being somewhat at odds with the world I created.” The Septurians are the protagonists. But “their relationship with intelligence isn’t something I fully agree with. That tension is what the story eventually grew around.”

Read with this in mind, much of what came before looks different.

The insistence that everything serves the narrative reads as more than a design philosophy. It looks like the attempt to hold together a story the creator is still, by his own admission, working through. The mandatory cutscenes can be read another way: not just as a protection of narrative integrity, but as a way of keeping the player close to questions the author himself is still working through.

The mechanic of stealing intellect — which began as a way to represent power — becomes an inquiry into what we do with power once we have it. Septura doesn't exist as a utopia or a declared dystopia. It exists as a problem the fiction is trying to articulate. What started as “a cool idea” became, in Trivedi’s words, “an exploration of why we crave power, what intelligence actually means, and why a society like Septura would still struggle despite seemingly having everything.”

That’s not a thesis. It’s an unresolved question. And there’s an important difference between the two.

A game built around a thesis knows where it’s going. A game built around an unresolved question doesn’t — and that uncertainty may be exactly what makes it worth following.

Additional details on Septurian Might:

No release date has been announced

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