The Firing Line: 5 questions about gorgeous Norse adventure The Frostrune

The Frostrune reminds me of Year Walk for all the right reasons.

It's a first person point-and-click adventure game for mobile steeped in European mythology and ritual. The Frostrune also has no small amount of mystery hiding behind the strokes of its hand-painted world.

But instead of Swedish folklore, The Frostrune is interested in viking culture and Norse myths.

There are effigies of iron strewn across thick oak doors. Cold forests surround what could be a beast's cosy home. A chest wrapped in chains thuds rhythmically against the rocks of a small stretch of coast.

Developer Grimnir Media has only recently unveiled The Frostrune, and the details are unfortunately sparse. Grimnir wants to maintain an enigmatic presence around its game.

But I'm not one to let that slip by. And so I caught up with John Saetrang, The Frostrune's producer, to find out how to get inside a viking's mind, and why puzzles with buttons and levers don't always work.

John Saetrang: Well, it’s a classic point-and-click adventure game so lovers of that genre will feel quite at home with it.

It's about exploration, discovering places, finding objects, and solving puzzles. To keep it as immersive as possible we've gone for a first person view with no cutscenes, no dialogue, no mini games. All of the story is told through the gameplay and the surroundings you explore.

What sets it apart is the Nordic theme, where everything from story, environments, and gameplay is heavily influenced by Norse culture. To top it off, the spoken language is Norse and the music is based on period instruments.

We already had some background on Norse material culture, so we had a good head start on the research. We had to read up some extra on myths and beliefs, and that was
very interesting.

Basically our research consists of looking at huge amounts of archaeological finds, reading the old poems, and trying to understand the culture. This is the background that we have evaluated all ideas against. Everything in the game comes from history or mythology in some way.

That said, we have taken some liberties too and filled in some holes, but only if there were no other option. You can never do these things with 100% accuracy, but we have really tried for a high level of authenticity.

Getting the objects right isn't difficult, there are lots of archaeological finds to look at. It’s just a matter of choosing from the right period and place. Environments are a bit more difficult, because they need to be believable and show traces of human activity. They need to tell a story.

To do that you need to know not only what kind of objects people used, but how they used them and what their daily life was like. The most difficult thing, though, is to try and penetrate their minds and understand how they perceived the world they lived in.

I would also say this has been the most interesting aspect of our work. And in the end, I think the game turned out to be
just as much about exploring their minds as exploring their physical surroundings.

We've gone several rounds on the puzzles in order to make them well integrated in the story and to invent puzzles that seem plausible in the historical context.

Puzzles in adventure games are often technical, with buttons, levers, lights, etc. This doesn't work so well in a pre-industrial setting, so we had to find some other solutions.

We hope to reveal something about this in our next video. For now, all we can say is that those who enjoy a good old sliding puzzle will be disappointed.

The art you see in the trailer is in-game art, taken directly from Unity. Although some of it is work in progress, the art style will be as you see it. A painterly style, but fairly realistic in terms of shapes and colors.

We didn't want photo realism and we didn't want the traditional high fantasy style. In the end I think we've found just the right style to go with the story and the theme, and we're very happy with the visual look at this point.

The aspect that might change the most are the visions you'll see in the game. We have hinted at this in the trailer, but it's still work in progress. The environments in the trailer are all finished pieces, but particle effects might undergo some changes and get more polish.

We're still at pre-alpha, but it's not a very complex game to put together technically. Nor is it a very long game.

So when we have solved a few more issues, we expect it to roll along fairly quickly. We're very anxious to show more gameplay, especially a few of the puzzles, so we'll try to publish more videos as soon as we can.

We also have some music coming up and some other things we want to show, so we hope people follow us for updates.

We're hoping to release the game in late summer 2014, but it’s too early to give out an exact date.