We’ll be working on a review for The Inner Friend, so I got in touch with Playmind to talk a bit about its development. Come check it out!
PS4Blog: Morning! Welcome to PS4Blog.net. Can you please introduce yourself to our readers?
Hello! I’m Emmanuel Sévigny, the founder of Playmind, and I was the creative director on The Inner Friend.
PS4B: The Inner Friend is ready to go on PlayStation 4. How would you describe the game to someone who’s never heard about it?
The Inner Friend will take the player into his subconscious mind through an Alice in Wonderland-type world, where he will be confronted with his deepest childhood fears with an atmosphere, tension, oppression, and vulnerability.
The player will be led by a mysterious shadow. Horrible monsters stalk the Shadow’s memories, and he’ll have to escape or fight them as he faces obstacles and puzzles in the darkness of the Shadow’s mind.
If you like horror games with puzzles to solve while having a poetic and psychological aspect, this game is for you.
PS4B: How long did it take to develop The Inner Friend? Where there any particular hurdles or challenges you had to overcome?
Well, we started in 2015 with a very different project in mind. We were developing at first a Kinect game with the idea that The Inner Friend was a small character that lives inside your silhouette, and you need to move in front of the Kinect to discover him.
After eight months of developing this first prototype, we abandoned it as Microsoft killed the Kinect. We started the project from scratch in 2016, keeping most of the storytelling developed before – the idea of meeting your inner child, this guy that you forget when you grow up. The atmospheric experiences were what drove us forward. We started by creating the environments, the characters, and then after we thought about what’s the player need to achieve.
So the project was developed as a giant patchwork with crazy atmospheres. The challenge in the last part of the development was to put everything together and bring the gameplay at a level that we take care of player experience all along.
PS4B: How long would it take someone to play the whole game from start to finish?
The Inner Friend will take you through seven different levels throughout the game. Through all these levels, the player will have the possibility to collect different artifacts in the main room. The more you move forward, the more the room gets warmer and cozier, bringing it back to life. Going through all the levels and collecting all the items will take the player around three hours – only if you don’t get caught and pass all the levels on the first try, of course.
PS4B: And now it’s time for us to go. Would you like to add anything else before we end this interview?
The Inner Friend is probably a game that will keep in your mind for long after playing it. There is something very universal about the idea of having a personal Inner Friend.
Play it with headphones and a big screen if you can because it is a very immersive experience.
