In this genre, you just never know where the next horror might be lurking. In recent years, adventure fans have been treated to haunting stories from all over the world, from the U.S. to England, from Argentina to Turkey. Not to be outdone, now a small team from Wales jumps into the fray with Rhiannon: Curse of the Four Branches. Based on the collection of historical legends in the Mabinogion, the debut offering from Arberth Studios is a modern day tale set in the remote Welsh farmstead of Ty Pryderi, home to an ancient rivalry between the prince Pryderi and the evil wizard Llwyd that has carried on even centuries after death. Now the "House of Pryderi" threatens to claim a new victim, a teenaged girl named Rhiannon Sullivan. For her own well-being, Rhiannon's parents removed her from the house after she began having disturbing ghostly experiences, but her absence only delays the inevitable destiny that awaits her, and so players will need to delve the depths of the paranormal mystery surrounding the house.

A new haunted house tale set against the backdrop of Celtic legend should have many fans anxiously awaiting its release this fall. In the meantime, we did a little probing of our own, going behind the scenes with Arberth's co-founder Noel Bruton to discuss the game and the upstart development team behind it.

Adventure Gamers: So, just a few short months from the release of Rhiannon. Exciting times, or scary? Or maybe a combination of both?

Noel Bruton: These are great days. We’ve been working on this for just over two years, part time. This year, with the launch fast approaching, the coding is a 14-hour day, every day and has been that way since mid February, so you could add ‘exhausting’ too! Fortunately, we had worked through the story and the plot pretty much in its entirety before we started heavily into production, so really it was a matter of implementing what we had already designed. As we got closer to the beta test, we were getting ever faster at completing scenes, and the snags became ever fewer and easier to overcome – so the light at the end of the tunnel is exceedingly bright. We’re encouraged by the positive things people on the forums say about what they’ve seen of the game, and by the enthusiasm of the US publisher, Got Game Entertainment. It’s a bit scary too of course – will they like it?

AG: Before we delve too deeply into the game, let's get a bit better acquainted with its first-time developers. Who is Arberth Studios?

NB: There are three of us. Karen, whose idea all this was in the first place; Karen’s brother Richard, a designer and graphic illustrator by profession; and Noel (that’s me), Karen’s husband, who is turning his years in IT in this weird new direction. Karen and I live on a Welsh farmstead. Parts of our home bear a striking resemblance to Ty Pryderi, the fictional setting for Rhiannon – that’s Richard’s doing. A stream runs through our garden, called the ‘Nant Arberth’. I suppose you could say we took the name of the company from there, but that’s not the whole truth. In the Mabinogion, lord Pryderi had his seat at somewhere called ‘Glan Arberth’. We live in an area of Wales where part of the Mabinogion is said to have taken place.

AG: This is your first game as a team, but did you have any experience as developers individually before Rhiannon?

NB: No, none at all. I had done a bit of programming, but only as a hobby. I had a novel published a few years ago, so not unused to writing fiction. Richard models rooms and landscapes for a living, so it’s not too much of a technical departure for him, but he relishes the creative freedom that he gets from Rhiannon rather than just illustrating an architect’s ideas. Karen’s always had a thing about detailed research and she’s turned that to good use in Rhiannon, along with her years of gaming experience.


AG: At what point did you decide you were ready to tackle a full-fledged commercial adventure?

NB: Pretty much the day Karen finished playing Barrow Hill. “We could do this”, she said to me. “We’d get Richard to do the graphics and you could write the code”. I went looking for tools – I’d never heard of a ‘game engine’ until then – but I remember feeling even then that she was probably right. We’ve since been amazed many times at how between the three of us, we have a peculiar mix of skills that suits writing an adventure game. We never thought for a moment that we’d do it on any other scale than to go for a fully-fledged commercial product. There were a couple of hiccoughs – the first engine we tried, it took us a while to realize it couldn’t do everything we needed, and then Vista came along and that knocked us back a bit.

AG: Well, that more or less answers my next question. I was about to ask if it would be safe in assuming that you were inspired by the (relative) success of other indie horror adventures like Dark Fall, Scratches, and Barrow Hill.

NB: If we wore caps, we’d doff them in the direction of Jonathan Boakes. Karen had already played both Dark Falls and loved them, but it was Barrow Hill that got us started as developers and then Nucleosys’s Scratches firmed the idea up. It’s odd you should mention those titles – they really are the main ones that made us start writing.

AG: Are you longtime adventure fans, or did the genre simply fit the story you wanted to tell and the best format for telling it?

NB: Karen is the adventure gamer. She bought a Sinclair Spectrum in 1982 to play text-only adventures. When she and I bought our first 386 in the early 1990s, we specced it for The 7th Guest. She has crates of adventure games she’s played. Richard is not a gamer, but we’re trying to convert him. I would play an adventure game if Karen recommended it. As the ‘adventure’ genre is really the one Karen wants to play, so that was the one she wanted to create. She had a shortlist of the sort of elements she wanted to see in the game, in terms of story, challenges, scope, player interface and gameplay.