A decade since its founding, Stormind Games has worked on various high-profile projects of other established IPs, including a game based on horror film series A Quiet Place, but its origins come from its own original horror IP, Remothered, which is soon getting its third and final part of the trilogy, Red Nun's Legacy.
While many modern third-person survival horror games pay a debt to Resident Evil or Silent Hill (the latter's composer Akira Yamaoka is incidentally Red Nun's Legacy's composer), the original game Remothered: Tormented Fathers was actually designed as a spiritual successor to the cult classic Clock Tower series, and which actually preceded the first Resident Evil. That game was in fact inspired by the 'giallo' films of Italian filmmaker Dario Argento, which felt especially serendipitous for the Italian studio.
Even the series' story is set in Sicily where the studio is based, although for Red Nun's Legacy, director Antonio Cutrona says that the team has decided to lean in on this explicitly.
"Our location scouting included just around our offices," he tells me. "The main villa [for the game's setting] is actually from an abandoned villa in the Etna area." Cutrona's referring to Mount Etna, a volcano on Siciliy's east coast that's still very active. While as a horror, most of the action is indoors, he promises the final game includes exterior locations where Etna is visible.
However, when I got a chance to try Red Nun's Legacy at Gamescom, what stood out to me was the attention-to-detail of its interiors. As new protagonist Susan, you wake up inside a mysterious villa, which follows the survival horror tradition of finding locked doors and unusual puzzles from objects and environments that seem to exist from another time and place.
But while locations in horror games tend to be decayed and decrepit, I found myself marvelling at this villa's ornate environmental design, from the beautiful mosaics decorating the baths to tables with colourful ornaments that would be easy to mistake as interactable objects.
Much of this detail has been made possible with the series' upgrade to Unreal Engine 5 and its Lumen and Nanite technologies. It's also with this powerful engine that Stormind has had the expertise and capacity to work on other AAA projects like Mafia: The Old Country.
Arguably, the secret sauce is that, while classic survival horror had come from Japanese developers' second-hand interpretations of Western settings and aesthetics, Stormind's team has been able to take in a rich array of references from its own culture and history in Sicily.
"This is about staying true to the Sicilian aspect of it, and believe it or not, we have many colours in our villas and architecture," Cutrona explains. "We didn't stick with a particular century or period for our cultural references - you can see things from the Roman times, the Greek times, the Baroque and Renaissance periods. We basically took what was important to us and tried to reference it everywhere.
"Having that kind of reference allows us to set us apart from other kinds of games. As Sicilian developers, we can do something that is truly our own and not the same story."
That said, there are still some outside influences. Of particular note are the Novices, masked enemies dressed in nun's habits that stalk Susan, who move in an uncanny fashion that was inspired by Butoh, a form of avant-garde Japanese dance theatre - serendipitously, there's also a Butoh organisation based in Sicily.
"One of Butoh's core principles is that nature itself is controlling you, which transfers to our idea of how [the Novices] move and behave," "The Novices undergo hypnosis, so when they speak to you they're actually saying things not relevant to Susan," Cutrona explains. "One of Butoh's core principles is that nature itself is controlling you, so that also transferred to our idea of how [Novices] would move and behave."
For any original IP, it's important for it to have its own unique imagery and motifs so that it's not just an imitation of something established. For the Remothered series, that has been its themes of hypnosis and trauma, also reflected in the metronomes that act as save points, as well as the titular Red Nun whose large cornette is decorated with an ominous red mask resembling a moth, also symbolic of the mind.
"They're all tied up to the concept of hypnosis, which is the mythos of the series," Cutrona concludes. "Harry Potter has magic, Lord of the Rings has elves. Remothered is all about hypnosis and trauma, and since the first game, it's how we have expanded the series."
Remothered: Red Nun's Legacy releases for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch 2 on October 27, and you can wishlist on Steam.
