Interview with the Creators of Hinterlight

Plus One team-member Will talked to Kelsey, Robbi, and Tyler of Gossamer//Coast, the creators of Hinterlight, about their upcoming Kickstarter campaign with Plus One Exp.

What excites you most about Hinterlight?

KELSEY: I’ve loved seeing Tyler's idea of a fae world become something that anyone can create. Coupled with Robbi’s delightfully macabre art, I'm just really excited at where this project is at. 

TYLER: Hinterlight is us trying to focus the infinite breadth of roleplay into a single specific experience, then giving you the tools needed to make That Thing a breeze to run. Seeing it come together and then seeing folks excited by the idea of playing it is straight up jet fuel.

KELSEY: It’s been so fun to talk about Hinterlight with people on the convention circuit. Robbi and I have been dressing up as fae freaks and passing out fliers for the game, telling people about how they can be dead adventurers building the world they died in. It's so reassuring to see how people's eyes light up and the excitement they have.  

ROBBI: For sure the thing I’m most jazzed about is that this is a game you can take straight to table with no GM and no prep. Any reading is juiced-up and taking turns isn’t really a thing because everyone is always playing, so there really aren’t opportunities for attention to wander. Accessibility and information hierarchy are always huge for me, and I’m beyond pumped to be able to work on a game that feels like it’s made to excite all kinds of brains. 

I’m also super psyched to dip my toes back into the world of comics—Hinterlight’s fiction is way exciting, and getting to reinforce that with the intro comic is going to rock ass. 

What surprised you when working on the game?

TYLER: Well, it started life as a solo-play trifold, so almost everything! The most pleasant realization for me was that resolving Hinterlight’s weird-ass prompts is a lot more fun when you're doing it with friends. It’s obvious in retrospect, but collaboration was not part of the original game and that moment of understanding was the first time the game told us what it was really about.

ROBBI: We had a specific idea in mind when we first thought about the aesthetics—a “book of hours” illustrated manuscript kind-of-style. When push came to shove, we realized it’d be way more fun, juicy and fitting if we just kept the visuals rooted in the fiction of the game by rendering everything from a top-down perspective of the ritual table. That way we get to use all the diegetic elements to create distinctions between different kinds of information.

What's something you've been reading, watching, playing, or listening to recently that inspires you as a creator, and what about it resonates? Any guilty pleasures?

TYLER: Hinterlight’s voice was basically cribbed from Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast series. Also pulling a lot from Vandermeer, Wolfe, Susanna Clarke, and (of course) Poe.

ROBBI: Gormenghast for sure. Visually? Toppi, Hades, Eat the Reich. We also watch a lot of weird shit to keep the juices flowin’. Hard to Be A God and Eggers’ Nosferatu were big for me. Tyler got me this book on gothic architecture that the Bloodborne designers used.

TYLER: All the FromSoft stuff, actually. There’s this haunted beauty that I really tried to capture in Hinterlight. It’s in Hollow Knight too—the feeling that everything good is already gone by and there’s nothing left to do about it.

KELSEY: China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station has been a big inspiration, especially the beauty with which he describes grotesque scenes and somber details that bring the world to life. My guilty pleasure has been inhaling the Witch Hat Atelier series (at the detriment of finishing Perdido Street Station). Similar to Perdido, it’s been captivating to see how Kamome Shirahama constructs the laws of their world and the characters' relationships to them. Lastly, I got to see my first Alfred Hitchcock movie this year, Rebecca, and it made me reflect more deeply on how I can treat estates as their own character. 

TYLER: My only guilty pleasure is playing Silksong when I should be writing Hinterlight.