On building games that ask, instead of answer

A game can be a question pressed into someone’s hand. Most are answers — a score to beat, a boss to fell, a number that goes up. We are interested in the other kind: the game that ends where a good essay ends, on a question you carry out the door.

Reading is the only verb

In Stories Adrift, the player does one thing — they read. Text, faces, weather, the way a kettle sits on a stove. There is no fail state. The tide moves whether or not you do. The pause is the work.

We don’t think games need to shout. We don’t think they need to win. We think they can be hiatuses.

That is the whole studio, really: a hiatus from a suffocating world — a sentence we ration carefully, and never put on a t-shirt.