Another World showed that less is oftentimes better. The more options you have at your fingertips, the more traps there are that will kill your dream project.
Someone beat some sense into E.C. and force him to work on a similar game.
The other game he made for Delphine, Future Wars, was beautiful (he was the lead designer) and had a neat plot, but was bogged down by an infuriatingly clunky UI that made it nearly unplayable. I recommend watching a walkthrough on YouTube instead.
After Another World, he spent years making Heart of Darkness, which was quite decent, but as everyone commented at the time, it took so long to be developed that by the time it was released, it felt outdated. It was famously so delayed that several consoles that it was scheduled to be released for (including the Sega Saturn) were defunct by the time it was finished. Apparently Chahi was so burned out by the experience that he left the gaming industry for a long time.
(I've not played Paper Beast, as it's a VR game and not really my type of game.)
Here's hoping he comes back makes some indie games. I get the sense that it's gotten a bit easier the last few years, especially with Steam making it easier to sell your own games directly to gamers.
A quote from [1]:
"The introduction (resource 0x1C), 3 minutes long weights only 57,510 bytes once compressed."
[0] https://fabiensanglard.net/
[1] https://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/index.ph...
Some of the puzzles were quite inscrutable but the overall game is still well worth a play-through (or even watch a Let's Play if that is your cup of tea).
lvoudour•7mo ago