Summary
When asked to describeThe Holy Gosh Darn, writer, animator, game director and Perfectly Paranormal co-founder Ozan Drøsdal settles on “It’s an epic hilarious comedy of biblical proportions“ and from what we saw in the preview atWASDin London, this sums it up perfectly.
You play as Cassiel, an Angel of the Lord who initially has nothing more to do than guess which breed of dog is going to come through the Pearly Gates next. That soon changes when she is tasked with locating the Holy Gosh Darn, and using it to stop Heaven exploding. She soon embarks on a time-travelling adventure where progress depends on asking the right questions and information is key.
Interacting with other characters through dialogue is the core gameplay mechanic, an idea dating back to Perfectly Paranormal’s very first title in the Tuesday Trilogy, which includes Manual Samuel and Helheim Hassle alongside The Holy Gosh Darn. “In Manual Samuel, we had a narrator that narrates everything you do, and if you decided to skip a cutscene then the narrator would either get annoyed or sum up some of what would happen, and we thought that was such a funny thing.” explains Drøsdal. However, “disappointingly few people skip[ped] the dialogue” and, as a result, the mechanic went unseen.
In Helheim Hassle, Drøsdal wanted to repeat the idea, but with a slight twist. The narrator was cut, and characters would sum up the story, or act like they blacked out if a cutscene was skipped. This led to an epiphany - “What if you make a game where a mechanic is to skip dialogue?” From this thought, The Holy Gosh Darn was created.
“It has to make sense that you skipped the dialogue,” Drøsdal says. “It would be hard to make a game about skipping dialogue if you didn’t know what was about to be said, so that’s what it started with. We wanted to make a game about skipping dialogue and cutscenes. So, time travel? That’s just to supplement the real mechanic, which is the dialogue skipping.
A Narrative-Driven Metroidvania?
“When somebody thinks ‘interactive dialogue’ they think, ‘Oh, you get choices, and then they matter, you have branching dialogue.’ And we were like, ‘What else can we do to interact in new ways with dialogue?’”
Drøsdal describes the result as “sort of like a Metroidvania where you read the information the character gets, because if she knows something, then that will unlock [a new] dialogue option.”
Players are able to skip, repeat, or fast-forward conversations based on what they already know, with characters reacting in unique and sometimes surprising ways to each one. As Drøsdal puts it, in this Metroidvania “doors and locks and items are mostly information.”
The dialogue is cheery to begin with, as protagonist Cassiel maintains an eternal optimism that not only will she guess the next dog, but it will also let her pet it. However, the time travel mechanics mean she soon finds herself having the same conversation over and over again, and this enthusiasm quickly fades.
“Cassiel remembers everything that has happened since she’s been traveling in time,” explains Drøsdal. “So if you trigger a dialogue that she’s had before again, after she says it the first time, she will progressively get more and more bored or more and more annoyed, as she says the same thing over and over.”
Multiple alternative takes were recorded for these scenarios, and Drøsdal says the team has “an ambition that the player should never hear Cassiel say something in the exact same way twice.”
Don’t Call It Quirky
The mechanics sound very quirky, but don’t let Drøsdal hear you call them that. “I don’t want to use the word ‘quirky’ anymore because that word has been tainted and cursed,” he says. “That’s because when they make triple-A games now, your usual kill people and wars and stuff, they’re starting to make those with improv comedy in them and they always call it ‘very quirky characters’.”
Drøsdal explains The Holy Gosh Darn doesn’t rely on one-liners or Whedonisation, but is more dedicated to laughs than throwaway comments.
We’re making a pure comedy game. You have death and you have angels and you’ve got Satan. These all powerful deities, and they take themselves seriously. So they’re not aware of the absurdity of their situation.
Perfectly Paranormal often dabbles in this world, and Drøsdal says he “always liked supernatural things,” but The Holy Gosh Darn goes further than before “We wanted to make a universe where all gods and deities and mythological creatures, they all coexist someplace in the cosmos. In my head it’s connected. I always put in hints that other mythologies are real too, like in case we decided to make a game that takes place in Greek mythology one day.”
The Tuesday Trilogy Wasn’t Always Envisioned
This already complex story is made even trickier by the fact the studio’s three games were never originally planned to be a trilogy. “When we made Manual Samuel, we had no idea that we were going to make two more games that took place the same day,” Drøsdal explains. “So it has been really fun to like to figure out ways to incorporate Manual Samuel into the story of Helheim Hassle, and The Holy Gosh Darn. Like things that happened in Samuel having consequences in the other games. I also managed to write things that you do in The Holy Gosh Darn that cause things that happened in the first game, which makes me happy because that game came out almost ten years ago.”
All the games are standalone, despite taking place on the same day, and Perfectly Paranormal is now just wrapping up the final touches on The Holy Gosh Darn before a summer release. “We are just putting in extra details and polishing it, and the details sound minor, but I think it’s the minor details that make many of our games. So even if they’re minor, it is a priority for us to get them in.”
The Holy Gosh Darn is set to be released in Summer 2024. You candownload the Demo or Wishlist on Steam.
