Bruce Straley helped shape some of the most iconic PlayStation exclusives. From his time as an artist on Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy through co-directing Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and The Last of Us, the Straley name is synonymous with adventures worth taking. That's one (although certainly not the only) reason his latest venture is so worthy of your attention.
Coven of the Chicken Foot will draw you into a world that heroes have long left behind. With monsters slain and dungeons plundered, you'll set about exploring the aftermath. A semi-open environment littered with the decaying spoils of forgotten conflicts; a playground for an aging witch fulfilling an oath to an ancient coven. "We're playing with the tropes of the adventure genre and the traditional 'hero's journey', flipping them on their head through a new perspective," says Straley.
"We wondered, 'What if the adventurers already fulfilled their quests and moved on?' So we're creating a post-adventure world with different, unique biomes filled with dilapidated dungeons, lush forests, abandoned mines, and dangerous caverns for the player to explore."
You'll control Gertie, an old witch with peculiar feet, as she sets about examining a verdant landscape and solving environmental puzzles. Rituals aren't completed in isolation, but rather with a peculiar companion – a towering creature that gradually develops new abilities and behaviours through contextual observation of your actions.
Old Gods
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Coven of the Chicken Foot aspires to refresh a genre caught under the long shadow cast by Japan Studio. "Fumito Ueda has a way of creating atmosphere, and has set the bar for creating bonds between the player and the characters in his games," says Straley. "Before hiring Wouter Gort as art director, we bonded over the idea of capturing some of the relationship building between ICO's horned boy and Yorda, as well as Agro the horse and the adventurer from Shadow of the Colossus."
Straley gestures towards "Yakul and Ashitaka from Princess Mononoke" and "Ellie and Joel from The Last of Us" as other key influences, but ICO and Shadow of the Colossus seem particularly apt. Coven of the Chicken Foot is a wordless adventure told through thoughtful environmental storytelling; a systems-rich approach to puzzle design and exploration informing how the bond between player and companion will transform over time.
"We've had to come up with innovative ways to work in the complicated companion space without having to scale the team up," Straley says of developer Wildflower Interactive's modest 16-employee setup. "The technology and hard work that's gone into the codebase is very real, and it's complicated tech. But we also made design decisions to help lighten the burden of creating a realistic human that can do everything a human can do."
Wildflower promises a degree of unpredictability in its companion system. "We owned the fact that the technology we are creating is never going to be perfect – it's inevitable, with the dynamic nature of this character, that sometimes the creature would make mistakes. But we leaned into that with our storytelling. We defined the character's backstory in a way that allowed us to make it charming and surprising when the creature makes mistakes, rather than frustrating or burdensome."
Straley tells me that the companion is "almost toddler-like in its curious nature," a behavior that invites you to "poke at and play with the creature to discover its reactions and quirks." He adds: "This allows the player to try out different ways to interact with the creature to see how it will respond."
Where the old witch has a purpose, the companion is naive to its role within Coven of the Chicken Foot – something which you'll uncover together as the mysteries of the world gradually unspool. "This is exciting because it opens up a unique type of storytelling. The way one player interacts with the creature may be different to how someone else does, which will create unique player stories for each individual. The creature won't fundamentally change, but its reactions and responses will be unique to each person's play style."
