It is hard to believe that So Blonde is the very first adventure project by the French studio Wizarbox, because it already promises to become one of this year's highlights. The game, only in development since last September, offers a crazy story with a good portion of humour, assisted by top-notch graphics. Steve Ince, who worked as a game designer on the Broken Sword series, is responsible for the game's story. We recently had the opportunity to have a long talk with Steve, along with So Blonde's publisher dtp/Anaconda. During that occasion, we were also allowed to have a look at some scenes of an early game version.

Stranded in the past

The main character of the game is a spoiled 17-year old named Sunny Blonde. During a luxurious cruise on her parents' wedding anniversary, the ship gets into distress near the Bermuda islands. Sunny falls unconscious and lands on a rescue boat. When she comes back to her senses, she finds herself alone on an island paradise. At that moment, she doesn't know yet that she has been catapulted several centuries into the past, into the age of pirates.

In the beginning, she even assumes that the pirates and the aborigines are part of a theme-based vacation destination. That's why she's astonished that nobody seems to able to show her the way to the next telephone or to the local shopping center, and so she worries more about her make-up and mobile reception.

Although Sunny seems pretty clumsy at the beginning of the game, her comments are always amicable. During the game, the player will have the opportunity to discover that she is capable of more than one would assume at first sight. Due to her luxurious environment, she may have adopted the social attributes of "being blonde", but Steve Ince promises that Sunny will experience an interesting development throughout the game. That's why he's been continuously polishing the plot over and over again, from the first draft through to the final version. The aim of this method is to grant a fully developed dramatization and a coherent story evolution. That's also why, according to Steve, the ending won't disappoint players, even those who think that boring finales are one the biggest problems of recent adventures. So we remain curious about what will await us.

Eye candy

The first scenes already show us lovely comic graphics with atmospheric lighting. The style reminds us a little bit of a mixture between Runaway and Curse of Monkey Island. The backgrounds are very detailed and filled with affectionate references to game and film classics, so the attentive player can discover a LeChuck portrait or a potpourri of Nintendo brand marks (star, mushroom and flower). Exploring the lovely island surroundings is definitely one of the main strengths of the adventure.

The screens come alive with countless animations like birds, butterflies, waves, clouds, bees, waterfalls and sharks. Even though dtp assured us that the presented graphics aren't final yet, they already made a good impression. The artists are using a blend of 2D animation and 3D models that really fits the comic flair of the game. Many of the game's 50-60 backgrounds are very large and scroll while being crossed. Wintermute is currently being used as the game's engine, but a switch to the OGRE software is still an option. The planned resolution is 1024x768. Animated cutscenes will probably be renounced in favour of a denser gameplay interaction. However, a prerendered intro and conclusion will be likely. These decisions aren't final yet, though.

Culture shock

So Blonde's game world will be populated by multi-faceted characters, from the female pirate captain Morgane to a voodoo priest of short stature to the shady "One-Eye". Naturally, a wildly cursing parrot must be in the lot as well. The dialogs and Sunny's monologues will be supported by small portrait pictures. The dialog topics are chosen from a list of simple keywords filled with amusing allusions to modern life and culture. Sunny quoting from Lord of the Rings, for example, will be on the order of business.

Controls for blondes

The handling is based on a classic point-and-click interface. A right-mouse click offers two symbols: an eye for examining and a hand for picking up and using items. If the cursor is over another character, an additional mouth symbol will be offered for starting conversations. A double click allows accessing a specific spot on the screen instantly. No diary or similar notebook function is planned, but the story should always make clear what problems must be solved next.

Constantly occupied

"Interaction density" is particularly important to Steve Ince: every screen shall contain a multitude of hotspots that can be examined, used or picked up. An important role is given to humorous comments by the main character in response to her environments.

Adventure purists can be reassured that there will be no action sequences. However, So Blonde will contain some casual minigames that fit naturally into the game. For example, using the visual style of Nintendo "Game-and-Watch" classics, the player has to catch water drops with a coconut husk or reach the key of a prison cell with a fishing rod without attracting the guard's attention. There will also be a scene of "strip arm wrestling", which unfortunately wasn't shown to us. Adventurers with poor dexterity don't need to be afraid of these minigames. Steve promised that the scenes are not supposed to interrupt the flow of the game and shall therefore be easy to overcome. Besides, they only represent a fraction of the anticipated gameplay of about 20 hours.

The scenes and puzzles shown to us already look promising. For example, Sunny needs to prepare a cappuccino (including acquiring all the necessary ingredients) or reacquire her MP3 player from a voodoo temple, where it is worshiped as an artefact of the gods. And similar to Beneath a Steel Sky and Broken Sword, the protagonist will be accompanied by a sidekick: towards the beginning of the game a small animal will grab Sunny's handbag and flee to a treetop. After luring the animal down, it will follow Sunny during large parts of the game and is also useful for the resolution of some problems. However, Steve didn't want to reveal what animal he's including just yet. On some occasions, the player will even be able to directly control "Max" during times when Sunny is unable to act on her own any longer.

Holistic puzzles

The puzzles demonstrated for us weren't necessarily complex or difficult. Steve tries to describe their structure as "holistic, overlapping and interwoven". Quests can spread over a large part of the playing time because, for example, the acquisition of needed objects can become more complicated along the way or be split into still more steps. According to Steve, the game will have a certain non-linearity and will therefore have more resemblance to Broken Sword 1 than 2. There also won't be any "Runaway syndrome", as any useful object can be picked up from the beginning. Some puzzles still seemed a little bit too easy to us, such as when you automatically win a joke-telling contest against captain Morgane. On this occasion, we would have preferred a dialogue puzzle à la Monkey Island. Still, the gameplay generally looked solid and is mainly oriented towards classic inventory and combination puzzles. Steve assured us that he's given a lot of attention to puzzle subtleties, so that the player should get some "Aha!" moments when discovering the solution to things that looked confusing at first sight. One definitely notices that the game tries to stay true to established adventure virtues.




Potential highlight

For an early preview version, the material shown to us already looked above-average. The characters and dialogs already give us hope for a crazy, humorous adventure. Music, sound effects and voice-overs were unfortunately not yet included in the alpha version. But if Wizarbox and dtp address these areas with as much care that they did for the graphics, we can easily expect top quality. According to dtp, the game has reached about 65-70% of its development and is scheduled for a November 2007 release.

This article was originally published on the German website Adventure-Treff. It has been translated and reprinted here with permission. Translation provided by Adventure-Treff's Luc 'LGH' Gilbertz.