Creating the strange dreamlike ‘Fourth-Person’ adventure, Pavilion

Visiontrick Media’s Pavilion is not your typical puzzle adventure game. It does not provide players with any instruction as to what they are supposed to do or what exactly is happening within its surreal world.

Pavilion launches today on Google Play as an NVIDIA SHIELD exclusive, ahead of its upcoming release on other platforms including PC and PlayStation 4. Even before its release this week, the game has received a number of awards and nominations for its stunning art direction, music and original game design concepts.

Henrik Flink, Visiontrick Media’s Creative Director and Designer, tells us how they are bringing a new type of “fourth-person” gaming experience to players with the release of Pavilion.

“Many games rely too much on tutorials and not trusting the players to figure out things by themselves,” Flink explains, adding that most players are natural problem solvers sharp enough to learn what they’re supposed to do without explicitly being told.

“And as developers if we keep over tutorializing all of our games, the players will start to expect that the games will tell them what to do all the time and not think for themselves,” he adds. “So it might be something we also want to consider in terms of what impact it will have on the larger audience in the long run.”

Pavilion's hand-crafted world and art direction also illustrate how you don't need to be a massive blockbuster franchise to deliver a visually stunning and memorable experience to players. Flink discusses what sparked the creative genesis of Pavilion.

“Pavilion actually started out as a pixel-art game at first,” he says. “But we had a hard time really finding any real passion in that approach. We needed to look elsewhere.”

Rickard Westman, Art Director on Pavilion, found a lot of inspiration from the timeless romantic works of European landscape painters like Arnold Böcklin and Caspar David Friedrich. The development team then came up with the approach of creating video game visuals and gameplay designed to feel like an interactive painting.

“Where the basic experience of just exploring the visuals with your eyes would be really interesting in of itself,” Flink notes. “You could even say that one part of the gameplay in Pavilion is the active viewing experience where you try to decipher the layout, finding out where the main character can actually traverse as well as what can be interacted with or not.”

With Pavilion debuting on NVIDIA SHIELD before it eventually reaches other next-gen platforms like PS4 and PC, Flink and the team at Visiontrick Media were struck by how powerful the SHIELD hardware is.

“Not only is the hardware itself powerful enough to develop on without any problem, the whole software side and interface have been really slick and great to work with,” he says. “Also, since it's really small and handy, as a developer you appreciate not having to bring a lot of heavy hardware to festivals or exhibitions and just being able to pack it down in your bag and bring with you.”

After four-years of developing, iterating, scrapping and reworking the ideas, sights and sounds featured in Pavilion, the game is finally ready. Flink tells us what players can expect with Pavilion’s launch on SHIELD this week.

“Expect to journey through an atmospheric and surreal world you've never seen before…” Flink explains. “It is very much up to you to piece things together in your head. You could either just progress along with the puzzling flow or try to dive deeper and read meaning into the existence of this mysterious place and the characters in it.”

Download Pavilion now on SHIELD via Google Play.