- EdEN, Owner
- On September 19, 2019
- http://www.ps4blog.net
We’re working on a review for 80 Days on Nintendo Switch, so I got in touch with inkle to talk a bit about it as well as on Heaven’s Vault. Come check it out!
PS4Blog: Hi! Thank you for joining us. Could you please introduce yourself to our readers to get us started?
Hi! My name’s Jon Ingold, and I’m the Narrative Director here at inkle. We’re a small studio – currently five people – based in Cambridge, UK.
PS4Blog: Heaven’s Vault is on its way to the Nintendo Switch. How would you describe the game to someone who’s never heard about it?
Heaven’s Vault is an archaeological narrative adventure with an entire hieroglyphic language to decipher. You play as Aliya Elasra, an archaeologist exploring the ancient rivers of the Nebula with her robot assistant Six, uncovering lost artefacts, tracing ancient sites, translating hieroglyphic inscriptions and piecing together a 5,000-year history.
The twist is that the game unfolds in a different order for every player, based on where you go, what you do, and which leads you follow. That changes both what you’ll discover and what you can deduce, so every playthrough for every player is unique.
PS4B: What can we expect content-wise for 80 Days on Nintendo Switch?
We’re bringing the complete edition of 80 Days to Switch on October 1st – so that’s the original multi-award winning game, along with the multiple expansions we’re added over the years: the North Pole expedition, Atlantis, North America, and Canada, the Moon and the Black Rose jewel heist. Some of those expansions are places you can visit, and some are globe-spanning stories you can get involved with.
All in all, 80 Days has hundreds of cities and journeys to make, around three-quarters of a million words of content, and you can play and replay it and always find new things to explore and do. You might even make it around the world in time.
PS4B: Going back to Heaven’s Vault, a game we reviewed on PlayStation 4, are there any differences between the Nintendo Switch and the PS4 version?
When we released the PS4 version of Heaven’s Vault in April it was the biggest and most ambitious game we’d ever made – and one of the most ambitious narrative games ever in terms of its branching and adaptive storylines.
Since then we’ve been doing a series of updates, bringing some quality of life features – fast-travel for space, more ways to sort through your unsolved inscriptions, that sort of thing – but also new storylines, character moments, and responses to cover all the strange and different ways the story can unfold.
We’ve also massively expanded the language in the game: we launched with around 3,000 words of Ancient, but as our most committed players have now completed the game six or seven times, they’ve reached the edges of that.
PS4B: Any chance we might get the Sorcery games on Switch as well?
We’re considering it! The Sorcery! games were built on different core technology, so there are some challenges there, but we love the platform and Sorcery! is still a much-loved game. We’ll have to see what happens.
PS4B: And that’s all the time we have for today. Is there something else you’d like to add before we go?
Only to say thanks to everyone who’s played and supported our games so far, and come on adventures with us! Here’s to lots more.