We’ll be working on a review for Lucy Dreaming, so I got in touch with Tall Story Games to talk a bit about the game and its development. Come check it out!
PS4Blog: Good morning! Thank you for joining us. Could you please help us get started by telling our readers a bit about yourselves and your work?
Hi, my name’s Tom Hardwidge, and I run my micro studio, Tall Story Games, in the UK with my wife, Emma. Our backgrounds are in advertising and marketing, and we started making games in 2020 during the COVID lockdown, with no previous industry experience.
I always loved playing classic point and click adventure games when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, and when our marketing work went a bit quiet during the pandemic, I took the opportunity to make an adventure game myself. I am the driving force behind the game concept and development, and Emma fills all of the vital producer and marketing roles, making my own dream a reality. Between the two of us, we have taken on all of the production work, from the narrative design and writing to the artwork, animation, development, and self-publishing on a range of platforms. It’s been a huge learning curve for us both, and we have successfully funded two games via Kickstarter since founding our studio.
PS4B: On that note, and since we’re currently working on a review for Lucy Dreaming, I was wondering if you could please describe the game to our readers in your own words.
Lucy Dreaming follows the story of Lucy, a young girl with a recurring nightmare. During the game, players will unlock the secrets to controlling Lucy’s dreams and unearth hidden memories as she discovers more about her past and the dark history of her hometown of Figgington in her quest to solve a decade-old murder mystery. I grew up watching British comedies like Blackadder, Monty Python, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Red Dwarf, and their surreal, sarcastic British humour is a huge inspiration for this comedy game.
Bringing this humour to life, we have an award-winning voice cast featuring Emma herself (I told you we did almost everything!) as well as Dominic Armato (Monkey Island’s own Guybrush Threepwood) and Sally Beaumont (Old Skies). It is our first full-length commercial game, and was initially released on PC in October 2022, with mobile, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox ports launched a few months later. Since its release, it’s been hugely well-received by players and critics alike, and we immediately started work on a second game in 2023, a Jekyll & Hyde-inspired Victorian comedy adventure called “Heir of the Dog,” which is based on a game jam submission we created back in 2020.
PS4B: How much did the game change between the initial concept phase, the demo made available during the game’s Kickstarter campaign, its full Steam release, and its jump to Nintendo’s hybrid console and Sony’s PlayStation 5?
As this was our first full-length game, the process changed drastically as the game development progressed. If I looked back at the original design documents and sketches I put together at the start of the project, there are probably only 10-15% of my original ideas still in the final game. That’s one of the advantages and disadvantages of being a solo developer; it’s very easy to get carried away and end up going off on tangents mid-development because it’s only my own time that I’m wasting, although I found that this organic process resulted in some of the more original ideas and puzzles within Lucy Dreaming.
The game itself has changed very little between the different platforms in terms of its gameplay and UI, but we are delighted to announce that, along with the new PS4 and PS5 launches, we are also releasing a major update across all platforms, which sees the game localised for Spanish, French, and Italian-speaking players. So often when games are localised the text is simply translated word-for-word or parsed through generative AI but, with Lucy Dreaming, we’ve gone to great lengths to “culturalize” the game, working with hugely talented localisation experts who have also worked on franchises like Monkey Island and Psychonauts to ensure that the jokes, wordplay and cultural references in Lucy Dreaming resonate with people in each language, offering an engaging experience to all players.
PS4B: Any way our readers can get their hands on some of the remaining copies of the physical rewards that were created as Kickstarter rewards?
Yes! Although the original Kickstarter for Lucy Dreaming was completed in 2022, the campaign for our new game, Heir of the Dog, funded last August but is still accepting late pledges, which include physical releases for both games. I post regular updates on the game’s progress.
PS4B: And that’s all the time we have for today. Is there something else you’d like to add before we go?
We’d love for people to give Lucy Dreaming a try, so many people have told us that they have enjoyed it, even though they may not usually lean towards point and click adventure games as a genre. We’re only a tiny team, and every single review, recommendation, like, or follow makes a huge difference to us, so check out Lucy Dreaming, but also search for us on social media (@tallstorygames) and reach out. We’re always happy to chat and share our experiences!
