BD: The Blackout Club also borrows heavily from the “suburban kids fighting monsters that adults are too oblivious to notice” subgenre of horror/adventure movies (Super 8, E.T., Stranger Things, The Goonies). What movies and TV shows inspired The Blackout Club’s setting and story?

JT: Well, you’ve certainly listed a few – also Twin Peaks, The X Files, Channel Zero, Supernatural to an extent. The ‘Strange Town’ and ‘Monster of the Week’ genres are exactly our jam regardless of our focus on teens. If you’re into movies, there’s Halloween, Hereditary and It Follows, The Blackout Club is an intersection of themes across all three of those – though it doesn’t spend much time talking at you, at least not directly.

BD:  In the tutorial mission, players take on the role of Bells, a member of The Blackout Club who has gone missing. How important is it to the team to continue to tell Bells’ story as the game progresses? How important is story to the team as a whole, and how do you go about weaving narrative into a multiplayer game?

The Blackout Club is primarily built for replayability, so there aren’t a lot of traditional story missions. That said, we collaborated with the South Park folks on the intro because it was important to us to ground the world in a human story, and for a lot of folks – Bells is the thing that draws them in emotionally. In-fiction, the teenagers take terrifying risks. Some of them do so to expose the occult conspiracy, but some just want to find their friend. Most of our story is told via community interaction with the game during live events – check out our Discord for some examples, if you’re into mass-investigation. The hope is that like a lot of old cosmic horror, Lovecraft and his imitators, players feel like they’re uncovering little details and sharing it with international colleagues before they lose their minds and are devoured.

BD: Some of the flavor text in this game —particularly the Sleepers’ ruminations— is really evocative. I love lore, and one of my favorite aspects of playing an immersive sim is the opportunity to pick up audiologs or diary entries that offer a look at the wider world. Do you plan to add more of that to the game?

JT: Thank you, I think I did okay with those! I love writing in the voice of the Sleepwalkers. Playing with that line between merely abnormal and truly paranormal was very important to us with The Blackout Club. We like to hang onto reasonable doubt about whether all of this is demonic, or just some change in mass consciousness.

BD: The Blackout Club’s map is clearly delineated into two tiers: the neighborhood and the network of caves below. Is it challenging, exciting or both to design two levels that are so visually different?

JT: It’s always both – the sleepwalkers move to an eldritch song, played by the great instrument that spans the town of Redacre. So when you hear the horror theme that plays when The Angel, our boogeyman, comes after the kids – it’s actually playing in-world. Stephen Alexander, our lead artist and co-owner, worked tirelessly with our contractor CJ Green to flesh out our fictional town of Redacre. They collaborated with me on the concept of the place, and of the maze-like instrument beneath. I think Stephen made them both feel charming and unnerving at the same time – there’s a small town sweetness to the suburban neighborhood which turns menacing at night. Meanwhile, the maze below is like nothing else. Our time on the Bioshock series might prepare you a little for the ambition of the place, but the period is harder to nail down, purposefully. We wanted it to feel timeless, like the vision of a mind that is far from human. The hope is that it feels like it transcends technology from a particular time, but relies more on the blood and sweat of the humans who occupy it.

From Patrick Balthrop, our sound designer, and engineer:

BD: I always use the grappling hook, and to me at least, it seems like the grappling hook is substantially better and more versatile than the stun gun or the crossbow. Should players expect more tools in the future and/or buffs or nerfs to existing tools?

JT: Oho, that’s the 200 IQ pick. A lot of players miss the power of the hook because it’s not offensive. The fact that the debate over that is so fierce suggested to us that we were on the right track, though your mileage may vary. We’d love to add more tools, but we’re a tiny team and every one of them affects balance in pretty dramatic ways. So it’ll be about demand versus our resources. We believe in the game and we’re not done iterating on it – the 1.0 release is teaching us a lot about the leveling grind, the live event engagement that works best, the most optimal play-styles, and so on.

BD: The Shape system, in which a mysterious being called the Shape invades the map and hunts players that commit to many “sins,” like kicking doors in or leaving bodies lying around, is pretty fascinating, and reminds me of the police in a Grand Theft Auto game. What inspired this system?

JT: In Cabin in The Woods, they go a little into the formula behind a lot of horror, right – you have to transgress in order to justify the audience taking cathartic pleasure in your death. To an extent, the Sin system is like that, the kids are breaking the rules, and slowly that draws the ire of our boogeyman, who the locals also call The Angel – kind of a twisted notion of a moral guardian. (The Shape is what the kids nicknamed it.) The limited visibility (you have to close your in-game eyes to see it), and the relentless pursuit of only the worst kid at the time, loosely inspired by It Follows. There’s also a lot of mythology about having a parasitical spirit or Nemesis-like figure attached to you, and we wanted to try actually simulating the needs behind such a creature.

BD:  I’ve just started messing around in Old Growth, but I’m already excited to see what gets added to the map next. Do you have any news on when players can expect the next map expansion?