REPLACED made a big splash at E3 2021, and for good reason — the upcoming cinematic platformer oozes cool, from its gorgeous 2.5D pixelated art aesthetic to the promise of a thrilling cyberpunk story set in a grim dystopia. The brilliantly directed trailer depicted a tantalizing and mysterious gaming experience that we here at Twinfinite have been making a song and dance over ever since.
Naturally, the opportunity to speak with developer Sad Cat Studios was one we are hugely excited about. Already this week we’ve published a feature titled ‘REPLACED Aims to Deliver a Cinematic But Thought-Provoking Cyberpunk Experience,’ which is based around some of the most interesting takeaways from my discussion with game director Yura Zhdanovich, and studio co-founder Igor Gritsay. But with so much ground to cover I could hardly include everything, and that, dear reader, is something we considered such a crying shame that we’ve decided to publish the entire Q&A for those who are as interested to hear from the pair as we are.
Senior editor Alex Gibson: The reception to REPLACED’s trailer has been so immensely positive. How did that feel, and has that added pressure to the team, or is it something you’re drawing motivation from?
Game director Yura Zhdanovich: The trailer was deemed by a lot of people very high quality, and so we are now a bit stressed because we need to deliver everything on this kind of level of expectations. We can’t go and do a section of the game that looks subpar in terms of quality compared to what we’ve shown.
And yeah, this is something that we have been discussing with our artists because they were definitely humbled by the reception, but there is so much more to show, so much more interesting things that we want people to see, either in-game itself or in any other media or going to release later down the line.
It’s just a start and we have definitely not shown the greatest things quite yet. It’s exciting for us — it’s stressful and exciting for us to see how people will react to things we show in the future.
Alex: Could you give me a little background on the game’s development? How long have you actually been working on REPLACED?
Studio co-founder Igor Gritsay: We’ve been in development since mid-2018, though back then it was merely an idea when we were searching for things that we could actually do. Before us there was this trailer for Atomic Heart, and it’s also made by the new studio, and of course, we could not tackle that as our debut project even though our guys come from game development, most of their work is on mobile. So we thought such kind of project was out of our reach and basically, we thought, okay, we should do something of that quality, but at the same time, something within our possibilities. So, we are thinking about what we can do, and when we were looking through our backlog of ideas, we thought that, okay, cinematic platformer is the way to go for us because while it isn’t simple to make, it was something we were capable of.
Then we had this idea we wanted to investigate — how could an AI integrate with a human? This was like the core idea that we wanted to develop and base our script around. So this was the starting point, and during the first six months or so we were just working on a prototype. I don’t even think that we have those things in the project anymore. But yeah, it was quite a view, just grey blocks and, say, a 10×10 area with characters walking around. But, hey, look where we are now!
Anyway, this was our initial idea –to make a cinematic platformer with beautiful visuals because if we can’t deliver, for example, a cool-looking third-person shooter, for example, I think that it’s within our capabilities to make quality looking and great looking cinematic platformer.
So we were looking at the games we love, the games we adore. Our first iteration of the game was much more, much closer to the classics, like Flashback or Out of this World. We made our first demo in 2019, and we went to several trade shows with this demo and they put the overall reception was really positive.
And it’s very stressful when you’re standing right next to an overheating laptop, and you look at maybe 100 people playing, and some of them just stop mid-session. And you’re so frustrated and they just go and don’t tell you anything. And you think what was the problem? What’s wrong with it? Even though 90 + % of people actually finished the demo and said that it was great, a negative reaction always has this effect.
Later, after those several trade shows, we thought to ourselves, all right, that was cool, but we don’t think that we will be able to create a whole game based on this gameplay because, well, in a classic cinematic platformer it’s all about content. And with the modern quality of content, the modern price for creating visual content, we understood that we just cannot allow ourselves to create a whole game without any substantial gameplay. So, we went back to the lab and thought, okay, how we can iterate upon this? And we were sitting with our favorite games, and looking at what’s cool there and what we can implement in ours and refine as our own thing.
What were the design inspirations behind the project that helped to shape its aesthetic, style, and gameplay?
Studio co-founder Igor Gritsay: So regarding the combat system, we were heavily inspired by the Batman series. I finished all of those games and they’re really perfect, and I really like the combat within those games. So we took inspiration there because of this fluid sense of flow and, you know, it just feels that everything is right and the combat feels natural. So, this is what we were trying to achieve. We weren’t looking for hardcore 2D games, like Hollow or Salt and Sanctuary.
We were looking for a more, not casual, but, you know, a cool-feeling experience that you have to master, but you don’t have to cry and blood and sweat while you’re playing. On the other side, we also implemented traversing which was inspired by games such as Prince of Persia, the Ubisoft ones, which were made trilogy which was made in the 2000s, including a Sands of Time. Also, the Uncharted series.
Basically, for us, platforming is there not so much as a challenge but a way to give an exposition for beautiful locations; and since I’m really proud of our division, they deserve that their creation has great exposition and that players can have a proper taste of what we’ve done and what we are, what our artists made.
In terms of aesthetics, our initial inspirations were more movie-oriented, such as Blade Runner, and 2049.
Game director Yura Zhdanovich: A lot of cyberpunk games or sci-fi games that tackle the more grounded type of action will be inspired by Blade Runner, but in our case, the gameplay was actually inspired a lot by the movie Upgrade, which was a really interesting take on especially the combat sequences. It is a really interesting take on a mechanical thing in a human body — how it will behave, how it would look like. I was very inspired by it; I’ve watched it like 10 times or so, and I watched it like a lot when we were looking for inspiration for combat moves or something. It really was a breakthrough for us in terms of how we should tackle combat and a more grounded game.