Endflame is a two-person indie studio based in Barcelona, but going by its 2022 debut game Ikai, and now its upcoming project Silent Road, its founders are huge fans of Japanese culture, especially when it comes to horror.
"We are not close to any specific genre, but we do like narrative games, so all of them are based around a story, and we are Japanese culture lovers," co-founder Laura Ripoll Galán tells me. Given it's a two-person studio, she wears many hats in development, though she says these include producing, design, as well as audio, the latter especially key in enhancing a spooky atmosphere.
The horror of Metahuman Creator
More important has been the use of Unreal Engine 5, which includes the astonishing MetaHuman Creator as a free plugin (used to incredible effect in Senua's Saga: Hellblade II). This has enabled Endflame to create realistic characters, which wasn't possible when making Ikai, a game that only had one character, the protagonist, who you also never saw since the game was played in a first-person perspective.
"Using MetaHuman Creator is why we've added many characters that can spice up the story," Ripoll Galán explains. "Instead of the story revolving around only one character, we can have different perspectives or with different unique characters."
She explains that the character models are actually handled by her studio partner Guillem Travila Cuadrado: "From what I've seen, he uses the basic models from Unreal and tweaks the parameters so the characters look like we want them to. For our process, we look up for references of the character, how we would like the character to look like, and then try to tweak the parameters. After we have the MetaHuman, if we like them, we export it into the project after some hard optimisation."
Taxi terror
Ripoll Galán estimates that Silent Road may have around seven to ten characters, although you won't see them altogether. Even with the new tech, the two-person studio still has limitations to work around. It then makes perfect sense that the game revolves around the player as a taxi driver in a remote region of Japan, so that you're just interacting with one passenger at a time.
As you might imagine, these aren't just your typical late night fares, as the region the game is set in contains a forest haunted by a long list of suicides. While it's evidently in reference to Aokigahara, a forest in Japan that has a reputation as one of the most used suicide spots in the worlds, Endflame has wisely opted for a fictionalised setting to no doubt avoid generating any controversy over a sensitive subject matter.
"We don't have the same constraints as we would if we based the game on the real forest," Ripoll Galán says. "It is the main influence but we would try to recover some legends or some dark stories behind that forest and adapt it to our own narrative."
Even with the use of MetaHumans, the key to horror in Silent Road is still down to being able to create a particular atmosphere, which can come from the environmental design that combines a "present-day setting with old legends from the forest". Some of that comes from not having too much of modern technology, even though smartphones are present. "The taxi we didn't want to be a super modern one, but instead it is an old vehicle. If you explore some haunted houses you won't expect to find high-tech in there, but rather old equipment."
Some of the most unsettling kind of horror is just being able to render environments that feel so incredibly realistic, but then it only takes a certain use of lighting or another uncanny element to put the player in a state of dread. Arguably, the very best example of this is P.T. from Hideo Kojima.
Story is key to horror
Ripoll Galán however thinks there's one more element that can help invoke horror effectively in Silent Road, and that comes down to the story itself delivered by its eerily realistic passengers.
"They can serve to create horror by telling stories that will make the player imagine their own feeling of being unsafe," says Galán. "If you hear something happened in a certain place, then when you go there, you will remember what you heard before. Then when you combine it with some jump-scares, a good soundscape that might create suspense that something's about to happen, that's how we build up this psychological horror."
Silent Road doesn't have a release date yet but you can wishlist it on Steam.
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