This is the Zodiac Speaking – Interview with Punch Punk Games

MonsterVine had the opportunity to speak with Krzysztof Grudzinski, Director/Narrative Designer, from Punch Punk Games (Klabater) about the upcoming first-person, mystery thriller-horror This is the Zodiac Speaking.

This is the Zodiac Speaking. If you could pitch the game to us without revealing too much, how would you do it?

It’s definitely a title for fans of dark, twisted stories in games, movies, and TV series. Fans of games like Firewatch, Vanishing of Ethan Carter, Soma or What Remains of Edith Finch. But, it’s also a stealth thriller with several endings.

Obviously there’s a darker element to the game than most other games on the market. Was there any worry or thought over how a game based on unsolved murders would come over to the general public?

It was a big challenge for us but we wanted to tell the story from the perspective of a protagonist who survived the assault, not from the killer’s perspective. The character of the Zodiac killer was just an excuse to tell the story of our hero.

How much time and research went into the case to ensure that the topic was treated with the respect it required?

The story of the Zodiac killer was something that fascinated me for many years. Before producing the game I have been researching the case for about a year.

One of the most apparent traits of the game is how the art direction feels detached from real life. It’s all very cold and clinical, was that intentional in order to frame the game’s themes more effectively?

Our aim was to make the stylistics not that straightforward so that the game could be also read on the symbolic level, interpreted according to the theory of colours. We aim at creating games with unique stylistics. And I really wanted to produce a game in post low poly style which is not an easy task, to tell a horror story in a stylized graphic style. That is why in This is the Zodiac Speaking we didn’t aim for realistic stylistics. We wanted to tell the story in stylized graphics, to make it more distinct from the usual styles in which thriller stories are told.

With the Zodiac case never being closed, yet its timeline still known, is it difficult to gamify a linear event, or does it feel more focused to have something to work alongside?The biggest difficulty was to place the story of our protagonist into the story of the Zodiac killer case.

The Zodiac killer enjoyed the public attention, was there not a worry that creating a game based around their actions would play into his status and give him, figuratively, what he wanted?

Before we even thought about producing the game, David Fincher has already shot the movie. This is the Zodiac Speaking is not a homage to serial killers, it’s a story about their victims or people who survived. I also believe that the story of the Zodiac killer is already deeply rooted in the pop culture.