Played with: "Paper Beast

The team of developers around Eric Chahi, Creative Director Pixel Reef, worked for over three years on the explorative paper-scrap art game "Paper Beast". Eric Chahi is none other than the creative mastermind of the 90s Amiga game "Another World". The "Pitfall"-inspired 90s game has little to do with the "Journey"-like VR exploration world "Paper Beast" at its core, but I easily sensed during the Gamescom gameplay that Eric has always been a fan of object and data modelling, which influences the gameplay and thus allows completely new game ideas to mature.

"Paper Beast" is just as much an example. We talked to Eric at Gamescom about the game elements of the procedurally generated art world.

A data universe

The idea is to let the player take on the role of an explorer. You are in an uninhabited country and observe paper creatures like silhouettes in the wild on an alien planet. The way the paper artworks move and come into contact with environments such as water is quite excitingly realised: namely, each time a little different and everything seems very lively. The game story leaves about as much room for interpretation: in the corners of the internet and in the depths of a huge data server, an ecosystem of its own has formed, in which a lot of lost code and many algorithms have been lurking for decades, out of which a small oasis of life has formed.

How Paper Beast plays

I am in an objectless zone of an oasis. Eric hands me the two PSVR Move controllers. With one hand I can teleport and with the other I can pull creatures that approach me by certain paper regions or lift them into the air and smash them back to the ground. It is also possible to pluck and let the curious mythical creatures follow me wherever I go. When I first looked up, I was a little taken aback by the level of detail of an oversized dragon-like paper tiger. I beam on to a hill area and don't know at first whether to turn left or right until a red paper monster attacks and shreds my "dog-dragon" following me.

A living game world

"Paper Beast is like a simulation," Eric tells me. "Every detail, from the lifespan to the locomotion of the beast adapts to your behaviour." There is no real narrator, however, nor is there any dialogue. The creatures you encounter are all made of paper, as they are later in the middle of a rocky tumbled landscape. Eric is euphoric for a moment and enthuses, "In time, you'll see that the paper creatures also interact with the environment and, for example, water sticks to them, too." The weather conditions are also supposed to change later in the game.

Impressive atmosphere

Suddenly I am surrounded by a huge storm and only realise how all the paper animals are whirled away at close range. The rain of paper shreds takes on the characteristics of a sandstorm, while the bottom of the pond suddenly plunges into the depths. At the end of the demo, I was quite amazed at how this spectacular paper rain with its manifold objects "flashed" me. The somewhat spherical music also underscores the initially somewhat barren exploration adventure and additionally puts the player into a certain state of relaxation.

In development for three years

"We started developing Paper Beast back in 2016," Eric Chahi tells me in the cosy three-man bunk in the Gamescom Indie Zone. At first I joked about whether the creative mastermind from Amiga times had developed the whole game himself again, to which he replied with a laugh that his newly founded studio "Pixel Reef" naturally has around 20 developers involved in this project. Before the creative process, they had also studied numerous animations of animals. From this, it was necessary to derive various iterative processes for the numerous movements. Eric already had an answer to our question about when "Paperbeast" would be released: so far, the first quarter of 2020 has been targeted as the release window.

Our first impression: "Paper Beast" is a gripping virtual journey full of interesting impressions. We are looking forward to the final version.