In 2005 during the exhibition E3 a group of Swedish students presented a trailer for their project. An unusually dark, out-of-the-box game was called The city of metronome, and the studio worked on it Tarsier, which at that time had not yet released any LittleBigPlanet 3nor Tearaway unfoldednor Little nightmares…
In their failed debut project, the developers were going to send us to a gloomy city in which the Evil Corporation managed to create a machine for building peace. But workers were needed to maintain the machine itself and look after the built-up areas, and they were created by sucking the souls out of the children.
The demo made a splash during E3, but after the end of the exhibition, no proposals were received by the developers. Only after gamescom they managed to meet with representatives Sony… The company did not undertake the publication of the game, but the developers liked it, and after a while they were entrusted to port Rag doll kung fu on the PlayStation 3.
However, Tarsier had no intention of giving up the City of Metronome. The studio made a new demo – and so it did not show it to anyone. Thanks to her, the main problem of the game became visible: the main mechanics associated with recording and playing sounds could not be made interesting and self-sufficient.
The idea is that you are trying to use sound instead of other types of actions, and it should always be cooler than all these other actions, right? If you want to make it a weapon, it essentially functions like a shotgun, but feels like a clumsy version of a shotgun. It’s hard to think of anything that makes this technique worthwhile. Otherwise, it’s just a trick to disguise an ordinary button press.
Tarsier Studios
The moment when the developers realized that they could not properly translate their own ideas was a turning point for the project. The head of the studio is confident that using youth and enthusiasm, they could still bring City of Metronome to release, especially if the publishers put pressure on them. But even then they would have to change the game design based on sounds to something more traditional.
However, the debut idea of the Swedish students never died out. Her traces can be seen in all Tarsier Studios games, especially in the Little Nightmares dilogy: the nomes are not much different from the metrognomes, and instead of the main character named Ten, we have the Sixth.
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