As a follow-up to their timeless preview of Mata Hari, Adventure Gamers had a little one-on-one time with Mr. Big Sky Trooper himself, Hal Barwood.
I haven't made a pure adventure game in fifteen years because, as you know very well, the market kind of fell out in the United States for this sort of thing and everybody stopped building them. And now they are making a comeback. We're fond of them, I think they have a very... (ponders for a while)... I like two things about them very much. The first one is that they are story-driven. That means actual character counts and the details of a story really mean something in an adventure game. I'm a storyteller at heart, so I like that very much. I also like the fact that there's something clean and whole and entire about an adventure game. It doesn't feel messy to me. It feels like a wonderful capsule of experience, like you would experience a book. It has a certain dimension that gets me involved [as a player] and when I go away it feels like I still know all about it and I feel attached to it. Whereas a lot of games are just very frustrating and I eventually give up. So I like that feeling too. I hope to do more of it.Topics covered include a more detailed explanation of the game's unique inventory system, Hal's approach to puzzles, how the concept of the game came about, and so much more.