Swery65: Kinect “best possible way” to express D4 themes
Deadly Premonition director talks Xbox One adventure game.
Players will travel between the past and present searching for clues about their wife’s death in D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die, Deadly Premonition director Hidetaka “Swery65” Suehiro’s upcoming adventure game for Xbox One.
The game uses Kinect for gestrure and voice control to reflect the hero’s actions and emotions in each scene.
“I’ve had the concept in my head since 2010, when we released Deadly Premonition,” Suehiro told Xbox Wire. “I wanted to create a game that allowed players to really slip into a world and follow the stories of the characters there while experiencing things with them.
“I always strive to create game mechanics, stories, and settings that blur the line between games and the real world, and when I saw the Kinect hardware, I knew it was the missing piece to my puzzle.”
The main character is David Young, a private detective whose wife was murdered two years prior to the game’s events.
“He lost his memories of the incident, but in exchange, he received the ability to travel into the past,” Suehiro said. “He uses this ability to crack cases to lead him closer to the truth about his wife’s death, and if possible, to find a way to save her life.”
Players control Young in a 3D space and, much like other adventure games, approach different objects to discover clues.
Suehiro added, “The player can also interact with a variety of unusual characters by speaking to them and monitoring them, and execute special actions in order to proceed through the story.”
These controls use Kinect, and “can be done from a sitting position on your couch.”
“Both its hard specs and the Kinect control device make the Xbox One the best possible way to express these two pillars that support our game,” Suehiro said, which are “empathy” and “repicating senses.”
“The new Kinect can detect palm shape, it can capture players’ posture when they’re sitting, and it allows for natural voice input. By using these attributes effectively, I believe that we can succeed at ‘replicating senses.'”
Suehiro stressed that the game is not about “mimicking poses and gestures” that appear on screen, but a game that “replicates senses” through the player’s unique interaction.
D4 is due out next year for Xbox One. View a new set of screenshots at the gallery.
