After the "Half-Life: Alyx – Return to Rapture" mod, Patient 8 Games now presents Memoreum. What started out as a Dead Space-themed mod, after changing direction, will launch on Quest and SteamVR next year. Read on for the full interview.
A year after the second chapter of "Return to Raput," Patient 8 has been busy. Moving away from modding, Memoreum tells the story of the slow death of the Earth and humanity's search for hope in the stars. Set aboard a colony ship, you wake up from a dream to find that something has gone horribly wrong, and you're tasked with discovering what happened.
It's a classic horror theme, and at Gamescom 2023, Patient 8 Games explained that the game originally started life as a Dead Space mod for Half-Life: Alyx. As someone who isn't very good at dealing with VR horror - once is enough - I didn't get too far into the Quest demo, but I was interested in learning more. We conducted a Q&A with Creative Director Seamus Bryner and Project Director Wim Buytaert.
Seamus Bryner:As a studio, we initially made a Half-Life: Alyx mod called "Return to Rapture", which was a mod for Bioshock. Then Wim talked to everyone on the team and told everyone, "We're going to do a Dead Space version." We started working on it, but we kept adding things and it quickly became a standalone game.
We've been working on the game for a year and a half since then, and we've been working on it. We are a multinational team, so [Gamescom] was the first time we met face to face. We have five people in the United States, we have people in Belgium, Switzerland, Russia, Switzerland, the Canary Islands, we are all over the world.
Bryner:The reason we approached this game in the first place is because we haven't seen too many VR games that have as much substance or fully fledged experiences as Half-Life: Alyx. And we're both huge horror fans, so it was a matter of putting our own spin on it and creating a complete single-player campaign. We are very passionate about this genre.
Bryner:You play as Dr. Otto Hudson, a famous scientist. He woke up from his cabin, was pulled out of it, and found himself on the "Century Dawn" spacecraft, which was humanity's last hope after several devastating events on Earth, such as changes in the atmosphere. Earth is almost uninhabitable. So they set off on a colony ship with most of them dormant.
Every now and then, they would wake up, and when Hudson woke up, something was wrong. If you've seen the trailer, you'll get a sense of this in the form of a walkie-talkie named James Parker. He's a scientist and will guide you through the process. You guys try to figure out what happened, how to fix it, and where to go. Essentially, it's about how to save humanity, because we really want to up the ante.
Bryner:It places a heavy emphasis on survival horror and leans towards action horror. We tried to create a delicate balance, adding just the right amount of puzzles and content to keep players engaged. We never wanted to be a pure shooter. It's all about exploration, finding what you want to immerse yourself in in a world like ships, characters, and unlocking secrets.
Wim Buytaert:Every little room has some detail that comes to life. Every detail has a little story to tell. We are committed to the presentation of environmental stories.
Bryner:We've always operated on the premise that there are diverse types of VR players. Some people like to speed through it, others take their time playing it like a regular video game. Our goal is to create a single player campaign with 10-15 hours of gameplay. It's a complete experience and we're working hard on game design with new game additions and replayability like secret weapons and more.
Buytaert:There are many gun crafting in the game.
Bryner:Yes, weapons can also be upgraded.
Bryner:We didn't talk about things like skill trees. A big part is about getting weapons, and then upgrading them.
Buytaert:You start with a small shotgun, it grows bigger and more powerful, and you get cooler stuff to complement it.
Bryner:The weapon system is designed by our lead developer. It's an all-in-one weapon that can turn into anything you want, but it's still a weapon.
Buytaert:If you decide to use a shotgun at a certain level, you can go to a crafting machine, disassemble your machine gun and make a shotgun.
Bryner:You'll also find some special weapons like the Cowboy Magnum, the Sawed-Out Shotgun, and more.
Bryner:no. Our first goal is to release on Quest first, but we hope to launch at the same time as SteamVR.
Buytaert:We also plan to tackle PlayStation VR2. We'll try if we get the chance. PICO also works.
Bryner:We don't have much contact with Sony, so right now it's just Quest and Steam.
Bryner:Our goal is 2024. We try to keep it general as we are a small independent team so you never know what to expect.
Bryner:We're trying to get in touch with more people at Meta to get dev kits to plan for this, but that's the plan.
Buytaert:This will be relatively easy. Our game runs very well on Quest 2, so it will be fun to improve it for Quest 3.
Bryner:We just really want people to get excited about it. We are trying to bridge the gap between traditional survival horror games like Resident Evil, Dead Space or Silent Hill in VR, bringing them into VR in a way that has never been done before. That's always been a huge goal, our main goal is to scare you and keep you entertained.
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