It’s been two weeks since a sequence of wildfires broke out throughout Los Angeles, with the biggest of these fires having burned over 23,713 acres and broken or destroyed over 7,000 houses and constructions. The identical week because the fires, The New York Instances reported that not solely was 2024 the warmest yr on document, however that temperatures exceeded the worldwide common previous to the Industrial Revolution.
Regardless of the way you have a look at it, it’s tough to disregard the seen ramifications of local weather change encroaching on our each day lives. Youngsters of Saturn, a first-person found-footage sport a couple of group of youngsters coming of age in an period of local weather disaster, faucets straight into this sense, chatting with our present second and urging for hope and motion within the face of obvious hopelessness.
Picture: Boie Thomsen, Nils Schulze
Made by indie builders Boie Thomsen and Nils Schulze, Youngsters of Saturn is centered on 5 youngsters rising up within the suburbs of Los Angeles. Framed via the angle of video digital camera recording, the story performs out via a nonchronological sequence of interactive vignettes following the characters as they loiter, discover, and ponder the precarity of their day-to-day lives.
For Thomsen and Schulze, the origins behind the sport date again so far as 2023, when the pair first linked up as companions for the Apocalypse sport jam on Itch.io. “As we began speaking, attending to know one another, our shared values, we knew that this clicked and we simply should do one thing with that means,” Schulze stated in an interview with epicgamejourney. “And in order that sparked the concept, principally, and yeah, then we labored on it for the timeframe of the jam and determined this undertaking could possibly be greater. We needed to do one thing extra out of it than simply get it on the market.”
Picture: Boie Thomsen, Nils Schulze
Over the course of the next yr, the 2 labored on fleshing out the visuals and idea for Youngsters of Saturn, drawing on their shared love of retrowave media impressed by the aesthetics of the late ’90s and early aughts. “Visually, we needed to make it extra private to us and use the stuff we grew up with,” Thomsen instructed epicgamejourney. “We’re, story-wise, making an attempt to justify it with the entire Y2K revival factor.”
Other than the sport’s PS1-era visuals and thematic focus, arguably essentially the most hanging aesthetic selection in Youngsters of Saturn is the utilization of real-life footage of wildfires filmed in and round Los Angeles over the previous decade, every punctuating the sport’s interactive vignettes with a timestamp comparable to its place within the sport’s bigger story. “It’s really, for us, the core of the sport,” says Thomsen. “The timestamps that you simply see within the nook of the video are at all times, like, set on the day of these occasions in actuality, even when it doesn’t at all times make sense chronologically for the story. It was simply extra vital for us to have this connection to the true occasions, so that you at all times can sort of deduct from the date and the timestamp what’s really being proven.”
The trailer for Youngsters of Saturn premiered through the EEK3 Indie Video games Showcase on Jan. 10, simply days after wildfires first started to interrupt out throughout Southern California. “We have been a bit blindsided by this occurring, clearly, and it’s horrifying to see, however for us, the fact is that these should not remoted circumstances,” Thomsen stated. “That is going to occur increasingly sooner or later, particularly now that local weather change deniers are being voted into workplace all around the world. We determined to make the sport about this particularly as a result of that is so actual. It will have felt bizarre to spend a lot time making artwork after which not acknowledging the truth that the world is on hearth.”
When requested what they might need audiences to remove from Youngsters of Saturn, each Thomsen and Schulze have been adamant about their desired response. “I need folks to be extra indignant and to carry on to this anger, as a result of it’s not OK,” says Thomsen. “What’s occurring proper now, being robbed of your future, it’s simply not OK.”
Youngsters of Saturn is accessible to wishlist on Steam.
