Child Of Light - Interview @ GodisaGeek

GodisaGeek interviews Jeffrey Yohalem the Lead writer of Child Of Light.

The game has been described as an interactive poem, a homage to Japanese RPGs and more, how would you describe it?

From the beginning we wanted to create a playable poem, so I think that is the best descriptor. I think it is a modern Fairytale – but that’s about it, I think that more words would complicate it.

What fairytales influenced Child of Light, and which traditional JRPGs/ did it take cues from?

I grew up on a lot of wonderful stories like His Dark Materials, the Chronicles of Narnia, stories by E. Nesbit. These wonderful stores that I would devour – I wanted to write something like that. It also harks back to The Longest Journey and Syberia. In this case it is about the daughter of a Duke, Aurora, in 1895 Austria who wakes up one day to find herself in this magical lost continent. She is struggling and finds that things are not what they seem, and she is going to have to do much more than defeat an Evil Queen to escape from there.

Was it difficult to tie together all of the elements in a game that is such a mix of different elements, being a side-scroller, poem, RPG and puzzle game?

No it wasn’t, because Pat the creative director and I both very firmly believed that the story should be the centre of everything. So we had the turn-based J-RPG gameplay and the combat and levelling system that helped the story tell the struggle to grow up, and so Aurora and the player are going through the same process and all of the elements; exploration, puzzle solving combat and levelling are about that journey away from safety and evolving into an adult.