Control your Cult like Pikmin - Worship Gamescom Interview

Audio transcription

"Hello everyone, I'm Alex here with Gamereactor, we are live at Gamescom I just checked out Worship, it is a lot of things, it is on top of everything Most so you are playing as the leader of a cult and you are trying to destroy the world It's got Pikmin elements, it's got sort of open world elements, it's got a lot going on Tell me about it Alexi, tell the people what sort of they can expect with Worship So Worship, as you mentioned, if we throw a bunch of keywords now It's a multiplayer open world roguelike in which you are a cultist trying to cause the end of the world And to do so you have two main mechanics, the first one would be the rituals So you can draw blood symbols on the ground using your own blood to cast different kinds of spells And depending on which spells you are going to cast, it's going to create different effects of course And one of those, the key ritual that you have is the conversion for the second main mechanic of the game The followers, so as a cult leader you are using your followers to do all of the dirty work for you So they will attack the enemies, they will be destroying the buildings of the other factions There is a bunch of stuff they can do, they can be thrown around But they can also be used as a blood vessel, so as a blood bag to draw your rituals or to heal yourself So as a cultist your powers resolve around blood, it's one of the main resources And the followers are not an exception to this, it is a way to get some blood also Using those two main mechanics we go into the gameplay loop in which we are put into a randomly generated world And we explore around to do cultist activities in general So we are going to convert people to our cult, we are going to attack the other factions And we are going to resolve and use our curiosity to explore that world with a bunch of secrets And a bunch of alternate paths on how we approach the encounters So let's say you could arrive on a battlefield and decide Do I want to help this faction defeat that big monster or do I want to release the monster and create more chaos into the world And depending on the actions you are going to do, you are going to have different kinds of rewards So your goal is to find those rewards, grow your build, your cult base to gain more upgrades, new rituals And prepare yourself for the second phase of the game, the test of fate The test of fate is basically the god that you are worshipping testing you Making sure that you are ready to help him in his plan And to do so the god will teleport you into an arena and you will defeat a boss or have a significant challenge afterwards You rinse and repeat that specific loop until you are to the final test of fate The summoning rituals and you are able to cause the end of the world as we mentioned And so we've got this split as you say, it's sort of like open world procedurally generated or randomly generated And then you've got the boss battles that you go into And we got to see one and it was sort of a mother and a child but the child is very eldritch So we don't feel too bad about beating it up But yeah, are those randomly generated as well or are they sort of you will get this boss at this stage This is your test of fate at this point It will be based on the zones, so when you start a run you will always have the same kind of team as a zone Or the same biome and then at the end of that biome you will have the same boss, the same test of fate Which will have a link in between the zone that you were in first So even if we don't explicitly explain to you what's the link in between You can make your like there's a lot of church people in the last church in this specific zone It is a boss linked to this specific fashion afterwards So there's going to be a link but you'll have to explore around to see what are the lore bits that we give you there To understand what's the context here and find all of those hidden narrative details I was just going to talk about something that you touched upon and something that we got to see as well Was this lore hidden without the world Because sometimes people with the keywords that we went over Some people might think well you know is there a narrative there for me But there is sort of one of those great narratives for you to discover and explore yourself Yeah, so we're not big fans of having overly exposed world building elements So the way that we do it is throughout exploration So there's optional stuff that you can interact with that is going to give you context in a humorous way Like with a little bit of jokes hidden in there But as more you explore all the secret stuff in the world And all of the paths that you can explore You're going to know more about how the world of worship works in general And it's something that we have been sharing with like the lore of the game And the world building of the game It's something that we've been sharing with our community on Discord and on Kickstarter Since the past year during development So it is something that we're really happy to do so But we do it in a way that doesn't interrupt the gameplay Something as well I was going to ask you is sort of It's sort of in two words it's why Pikmin Some people might think you know Pikmin just as a sort of genre idea Which is often associated with very cutesy stuff And we'll go into the art design a bit because I think it's fascinating What you've done with the sort of creation and the visual look of this game But what was the sort of design idea for going with this gameplay style That Pikmin is usually associated with?
Well I think it's a genre that's not really well Not as popular as it should be We're big Pikmin fans we really like the game in general And we thought initially we started to work on this game By the theme and the art style of the game We wanted to do the black and white And we wanted to have the red of the blood Really showing up in that black and white environment And then we started thinking about cults And then thinking about doing blood rituals And then came along the oh as a cult leader doing blood rituals Having followers and like the player fantasy of the Pikmin With the cult leader made sense for us So we tried to experiment with that And the first prototype was really fun so we decided to go along with this I really like it as I was saying The art style is really really good as you say The red really pops and so do the other colours as well Like black even though it takes up a lot of the map Feels like it really pops on it But it's also quite cutesy in a way with some of the followers Like even though you're like loving them around and draining them of blood You don't feel like you're doing something that bad Was this intentional?
What was the sort of thought process designing the art style for the game?
Oh yeah it was purely intentional We want to have that dark humour in there We want to have like all of the followers Have little butts that has created really good reactions to people so far We have jokes in the game It has to be something that doesn't take itself too seriously It is as grim as it is cute and whimsy at the same time And that was the intention from the beginning And also I would just like to draw attention to the god design We have multiple gods in the game And some of which are sort of scattered around the map Is there a potential of maybe seeing your faith in your god Potentially tested at what point in the game Or is it just you're sticking with this guy no matter what?
Throughout the run you'll be testing with this guy We might experiment with specific encounters at one point to create a twist But the main gameplay here is really about You have this god for this run because it is a run based game The roguelike elements goes throughout The fact that when you start a game it's randomly every time But as you start a game you will choose which god you want to worship for this specific run So that's when you're going to change Even if you lose or if you succeed the game You'll be able to try it again with a different god You also have a lot of customization in the world in general You can change your own abilities Could you talk a bit about those gems, how you pick them up And what they can do for the player, their followers and other stuff?
The way that you upgrade and you get stronger as a cult Is to create a cult base So you will find those kind of worm filled crystals of different colors And all of those crystals if you put them in the right spot in your base Will give you a different upgrade Each color will grant you an upgrade based on a specific aspect of the game So the pink ones are going to be an upgrade for your cultists The grey ones are going to be an upgrade for your followers And the red ones are going to be new rituals that you can use And you will unlock those upgrades to get stronger and stronger And depending on the shape and how big the crystal is We call them catalysts actually So our game designers would be happy if I call them the right way The catalysts that you use depending on the shape Is going to give you different tiers of rewards So the more and more challenging and the more you advance in the gameplay loop The bigger the rewards will be Alexi, thank you so much for your time When can we see Worship and where can we see it?
So you can start right now by wishlisting the game And following us on Discord and social medias in general We interact with our Kickstarter community and Discord community every day Well every month on Kickstarter and every day on Discord And we will be releasing Steam demo pretty soon this year And we will be announcing the release date either by the end of the year This year or in early 2025 Depending on how production and marketing goes So stay tuned for the Steam demo that's coming pretty soon And we also just released a new gameplay video Explaining everything I just said but in a maybe more coherent way So you can watch it as well And also a 5 minute video explaining the main mechanics and gameplay loop Ok, go watch the video, go wishlist on Steam Alexi, thank you so much for your time Thank you"