Following its public reveal at Gamescom, we sat down behind closed doors with Dlala Studios for a first look at Murals – a dark, subverted fairytale action-adventure where Sleeping Beauty is suddenly an insomniac, Rapunzel’s hair has a mind of its own, and Rumpelstiltskin has developed an unyielding passion for theater. Known for their vibrant, hand-painted aesthetic on titles like Battletoads and Disney Illusion Island, Dlala’s latest project traps players in a twisted world alongside a sentient sketch companion named Loaf, tasking them with hacking, slashing, and experimenting through crooked castles and living mazes. Following our hands-on preview, we sat down with Dlala CEO and Game Director Aj Grand-Scrutton to dive deeper into tone balancing, player-driven balance breaking, and what it really takes to self-publish their first original IP in over a decade.
With Murals, you’re taking dark, subverted fables – like a sleepless Sleeping Beauty – and pairing them with your signature vibrant, hand-painted aesthetic. How do you strike the right balance between keeping the world feeling genuinely twisted while maintaining the charming visual comedy and expressive animation style your studio is known for?
Thank you for the lovely words about our studio! It’s a really great question and definitely was a challenge for the team. Something I think that we do well as a studio is that we appreciate the juxtaposition of light and dark, as cliché as that is. The way we approach narrative at our studio is that we’re not writing a traditional “narrative” game, we’re not going to be creating an epic story such as “The Last of Us”. Our writing is focused around dialogue, we really make extended sitcoms over action in our cutscene. I’m more of a wannabe Kevin Smith than I am a wannabe Michael Bay, in that sense.
What this means is that the writing is there to serve the gameplay. When we want to go darker with the settings, and even the underlying objective, of an area we always have this brightness in the stupidity of the characters and dialogue. We also aren’t afraid to do the opposite where there are moments of sadness to characters that are offset by the sheer ridiculousness of the situation and what you’re doing.
I have always thought the best dramas have moments of humour, and the best comedies aren’t afraid to go dark. It just makes things feel ‘real’, which I know is ridiculous based on the game we are making!
The game kicks off with a blank-slate hero relying on a sentient sketch named Loaf. What was the initial concept behind Loaf as both a narrative companion and a visual contrast to the rest of the world, and how does he help ground players amidst the absurdity of the world around them?
What a wonderful question! I’ll take any opportunity I can to speak about Loaf. As you mentioned it was always our intention that the Lead Character in our game isn’t the hero, but the player themselves. This meant that The Hero needed to be a blank canvas and that we weren’t forcing words into, and out of, the player’s mouths that they didn’t feel fit the role they wanted to play. This decision in turn led to us needing a real ‘mouthpiece’ character for the player that can go through the journey with them and guide them, even though they were themselves learning about the world. To really achieve this feeling of learning alongside your companion we couldn’t have Loaf be already established in the world, we needed them to really be brought into it at the same time as you. This is how we landed on the concept of Loaf being a sketch in your pocket, and that his being brought to life was a side-effect, not an intention, of the magic that brings the Murals to life. In terms of grounding the player amidst the absurdity, I’m not going to lie to you, Loaf does not help with the absurdity – he is, at times, the most absurd character in the game! However I think what he does do is not try to sweep the absurdity beneath the carpet. If anyone has played any of our titles, such as Battletoads [2020] or Disney Illusion Island, they know that a technique we like to utilise is that you have one character that isn’t afraid to acknowledge how weird things are and when they don’t make sense. Loaf definitely fits into this mould for us, although I do think he’s one of my favourite characters we’ve ever created!
Combat pairs melee and ranged weapons with ‘Eeries’ – trinkets from Magic Dave’s Vending Machine that add elemental twists like poison or lightning. Unlike classic roguelikes, players build up an ongoing persistent inventory. How do you design these weapon and trinket synergies to encourage player experimentation without breaking high-level game balance?
Let’s start with the last part of that question first: “without breaking high-level game balance?”. The honest answer is that we are 100% open to players breaking the game balance. We very quickly established a rule when we were developing Eeries, and the game as a whole, that if the player found ways to have fun that made them overpowered that we weren’t going to balance it out. But the most important part of that is that they are having fun. Any balance issues that aren’t fun we will obviously be looking to fix, but if our players have had the luck of the draw on their side and they’ve pulled out a super overpowered Eeries build mid-way through the game, as long as they are getting excited and having a great time then we want to embrace that and let them carry on.
In regards to encouraging experimentation I think something that Grant [Allen, Design Director] and his team have done very well is create a bunch of Eeries that don’t just feel like upgrades to existing things. What might be a great combination for you, might not suit my playstyle and visa versa. I think the quantity we give you, compared to the restriction of the slots, also means that sometimes you’ll get an Eerie a few hours in that makes you suddenly start looking at others in your inventory that you haven’t been using. But also if you find a setup that you really love, we want to dangle the carrot but not force you to stop playing the way you’re enjoying.
The overarching antagonist, The Creator, is an artist who actively monitors the player’s progress and adapts to their successes. How does this meta-narrative tie into actual gameplay mechanics, and does the environment or enemy behavior dynamically react to his surveillance?
The Creator is really the meta level wrapper for the entire game. He is the glue that sticks all these very different interpretations of very different stories together. Now, we are definitely not looking to mislead anyone so I want to be honest, he’s not going to be dynamically changing the game etc… but what I will say is there are moments where you will definitely see changes in the Creator themselves.
Having had the opportunity to see Murals in action behind closed doors at Gamescom, the response to the initial reveal seemed overwhelmingly positive. What were some of the most insightful takeaways or surprising reactions from presenting the game to press and industry peers in person for the first time?
To say we were, and still are, overwhelmed with the response would be completely underselling it to be honest. We were really excited to show what the team had been working on, especially not only being our first big reveal in 3 years, but our first original title in over a decade and the first game we’ve ever published ourselves.
We have a track record of making quite divisive games, and I don’t anticipate that Murals will be any different, but I have to admit it’s been really lovely seeing people just get what we’re doing. We always have fears, as Director and CEO I live in a world full of them, but seeing that people understood that we were combining the fast paced moment-to-moment of roguelike/hack n slash but with a very linear point to point adventure was a massive relief. Our humour is always an interesting one, from Battletoads [2020] to Disney Illusion Island to Murals I think you can definitely tell it’s from the same studio, but with Murals we very much have been a bit cheekier and I wasn’t sure how that was going to land so that was really lovely to see.
We’re doing User Testing sessions at the moment trying to learn and refine, and there have definitely been some revelations to us where we’ve taken our internal knowledge of the game for granted. We’re trying to learn every day and find ways to be better!
After over a decade of working on renowned IPs like Battletoads and Disney Illusion Island, Murals marks your return to a fully original, self-published IP. How has taking full ownership of both development and publishing changed – or challenged – your creative freedom when building this world?
I spoke about this with the team recently. I think a lot of people assume that when you’re not answering to a publisher etc… that you go completely off the rails, and out of scope and do whatever you want. That has definitely not been the case for us, I think a combination of the responsibility mixed with the lessons we learned off the rest of our portfolio has meant that we’ve been more conscious of scope than we ever have. We made cuts when we went from the concept phase to pre-production and we made more cuts going from pre-production to production. What I will say is that I feel this game is the most we’ve ever ‘known’ about a game as we’re making it. It’s quite common for us, and my frantic leadership approach, that we’re still making discoveries quite late in the day whereas I feel with Murals the team did a great job of establishing and answering questions as early as possible. Since then it’s all been about refinement.
With ‘The Distorted’ twisted legends standing between the player and their escape, can you tease how far off the rails some of these classic fairytale figures get by the time players reach late-game boss encounters?
Look, we’re weird and we’re very proud of it. This game is weird and very proud of it. It starts weird and gets weirder. I think that the first couple of levels are the most ‘grounded’ and they feature an anthropomorphic frog dressed in regality who speaks with a Boston accent. We really really push the boat out on some, Rumpelstiltskin is one of my favourite murals and that is a weird story with weird characters. I think that players will continue to be surprised by our takes as they go through the game and I hope they really love the worlds and characters that we’ve crafted.