It helps that I’m hunting Bigfoot.
He starts to amble towards me, the thump of his strides registering through the controller.
I panic, draw an arrow, and send it flying into his shoulder.
Bigfoot doesn’t like that.
He’s so angry he gets himself stuck on the geography.
Bigfoot chases me into the forest, and the demo ends soon after.
“I really wanted to bring it in and have a tactile in-world feel.
So it just made sense to me to solve it that way.
And then it feels more like you’re actually exploring.”
The world itself is a full of strange triangular totems and ritual sites surrounded by gesturing statues.
See that colossal skeleton?
it’s possible for you to go there.
Among the things the game doesn’t share with Skyrim et al are dungeons.
“It’s all out in the open,” Purkeypile says.
I want to say the tallest one is like ten storeys tall.
I kind of need that breathing room for these characters.
As Purkeypile sees it, “Skyrim is about going to a dungeon and exploring the dungeon.
This is a hunting game.
So like, it plays better, it looks better - it looks more distinct.”
“Those stories are essentially their own.
Folklore is about telling stories.
Not just me writing a bunch of stuff.”
They’ll have their own interpretation which could be completely off-base, but they would still write it.
That’s a much more realistic way to tell a story versus ‘here is the lore’."
“It gets weirder and weirder as you get later in the game,” Purkeypile says.
“There’s this area of cloaked in darkness, with all this fog everywhere.
So you’re like, I know something’s moving.
But every time I look around, I don’t know where it is.”
To bring down such horrors, you’ll probably need posher ammunition.
The monsters are, alas, probably the aspect of The Axis Unseen that needs most work right now.
Is this a fair characterisation, I ask Purkeypile in closing?
“Yeah, I think that’s accurate,” he says.
“Some people are like, ‘Oh, you’re making Stealth Archer: The Game’.
