Game:

The Night of the Rabbit (2013)

Duration: 22:34

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We caught up with Daedelic creative director Jan "Poki" Müller-Michaelis at GDC for a long chat about the conclusion of the Deponia trilogy, The Night of the Rabbit, and the state of adventure games and their recent revival , particularly in his native Germany.

"I've always thought that games in the state that they are now, they just use a small variety of possible dramaturgic motifs. I've always wanted to explore different things, to make them playable, not before and after the gameplay takes place, but via the gameplay.

One of them is the mistaken identity comedy, like perhaps you know The Court Jester with Danny Kaye - a very old movie, but a very brilliant one - or being in San Francisco now What's up Doc? where there are different bags that look the same and they are being mixed up all the time. And that's something I've written into the Deponia series from the very beginning, but I couldn't really yet fire this loaded gun. Now in the third part finally we get to the point where I can use this set up I've built for two games now like Rufus being a complete doppelganger to his rival Cletus. You will get lots of madness, some of the motifs you will recognise from movies. For example, we have a hotel floor with many doors and you just have to imagine some Benny Hill-ish music under it and you will know what's going on there."

The next release from Daedelic Entertainment, The Night of the Rabbit (out on May 31), was created by Matthias Kempke (What makes you Tick: A Stitch in Time), but as the creative lead of the entire company "Poki" had a hand in the game as well, and he was more than happy to share his thoughts on it:

"It's a quite magical experience. Matt himself told me that he was always intrigued of the idea: what if the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland had a plan for Alice when he lured her into the Wonderland? That thought is the inspritional source of The Night of the Rabbit. So it's mixed up in a way with Alice in Wonderland on the one hand and Doctor Who on the other hand."

Speaking of the resurgence of adventure games and point-and-click, "Poki" had the following:

"In Germany we have managed to bring it back. It's a thing there again, and it's not that only the old nostalgic guys like us are playing who loved the old game and the golden era of the genre. That was the state when we started making games and we wanted to bring it back because I was very sad when suddenly all the developers finished to make those games. As a writer I always thought, "no, they just opened up the first door to all these possibilities, but they just took this first step inside this whole new world, there's so much new land so many stakes you claim."

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