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Isang manunulat, narrative designer, game developer, at isa sa mga tagapag-ayos ng Celsius 232, si Ángel Luis Sucasas ang perpektong huling hintuan sa aming panahon sa Asturias. Sa detalyado at mapagnilay-nilay na pag-uusap na ito, tinalakay namin ang kanyang mga bagong laro Tuned In at Toymaker: Threads of Joy, ang kanyang panahon sa Tequila Works at MercurySteam at ang mga aral na natutunan doon, ang kanyang pinakabagong horror anthology na Seven in the Darkness, kung ano talaga ang ibig sabihin ng mga genre ng fiction, at kung ano ang aasahan mula sa Celsius 232 sa 2027.
"Hi Gamereactor friends, this is my last interview, my last day at the Celsius 232 in Avilés Asturias, Spain, and I think it's a nice icing on the cake to talk with you, Ángel, we were colleagues, we were friends, and you are also a game developer and also, of course, an author, and this is all about authors here."
"So we can talk games, the event itself, because you are part of the organization, and also books.
First and foremost, I wanted to ask about games.
And you guys are introducing a new, very interesting, very fresh concept to horror games, which is called Tuned In.
So please let our viewers tune in your new concept."
"This new concept, I think, is all about finding the balance between gameplay, innovative gameplay, and cool storytelling.
So we want to do like the first WarioWare, or something like that, a minigame collection of different mechanics, with proper storytelling that ties all together.
Our game Tuned In is about a TV that is cursed, that lures you to look at it unblinkingly, so it's pretty disturbing."
"But what happens is the lineup of channels that you are playing, which have a specific gameplay, each one has a specific mechanic, setting, camera, and all of that, are about your traumas.
So you have to be careful, because as much as you go deeper into the lineups of the TV, the channels and the mechanics and minigames that you play become darker and darker and related to the story of the character."
"Tell me a little bit more about the gameplay mechanic.
What are we going to do, controller in hand or mouse and keyboard in hand, to sort of progress through this twisted narrative?
Picture that you are watching an old TV with dials.
And picture that you are in first person, and with each character you have your hands over the dials."
"So you basically control the game with your sticks.
One stick is one dial, the dial of tune, so to just tune each channel, and the other is the volume.
And then you have channel up and channel down, only four.
That's the whole control of the game."
"In each channel we change what it means to turn volume, to turn tune, and to change the actions of the channel up and channel down.
So imagine that you are in a runner, first person view, running through a forest, just fleeing away from your stepfather that is chasing you.
So suddenly, it's a lot of game, suddenly the channel up and channel down is jumping and crouching inside the forest runner."
"In another scene, we have a scene where the stepfather is watching the TV that is sitting in his mind and all of that, and you are sneaking behind some sofas and that.
In that, the tune is moving forward, moving backward, and the action, only one button, is crouching for you not to see.
And we have a quizzle, and in the quizzle you can control the gun that is aiming every time you fail to one member of your family, and the action button is actually shooting."
"So plenty of game mechanics with only a limited amount of control.
We are basing all the game design in a lesson from Masahiro Sakurai on his YouTube channel, which was about one buttons and the possibilities that we have of exploring one buttons, and that's the whole thing.
We want to do plenty of game mechanics, like 20, 30 minigames in the full game, that always use the same set, which is turning, turning, and pressing a button."
"Or hold it.
And then you survive, or make your family survive, if you manage to complete a succession of microgames, right?
Yeah, and there is a super complex branching narrative, even in the demo.
I wouldn't expect less from you guys."
"Of course. We are going to do, even in the demo of Steam, that is going to be free for everyone, you will see that it has eight possible endings.
And depending on your performance in the minigames and all of that, you will get different endings, and even a different branch."
"So we want to branch this game a lot.
We want to have meaningful branching, like I will see certain scenes, scenarios, characters, and that in one branch that I wouldn't see in another.
And that's going to be one of the main features of the game, if we get to make it."
"And Nintendo thought they had released WarioWare Twisted.
They hadn't yet.
Okay, just one more thing about this Tuned In game.
Tell me a bit more about the team behind it, because artistically it looks striking already."
"The team is the same team that did Song of Nunu, Rime, Gylt, and part of Cyberpunk 2077.
Because our lead level designer, Manu, was a senior level designer in Cyberpunk.
So David Canela, this is an original idea of David Canela, which was the director of Gylt and Song of Nunu."
"And he always said that I put the G-virus in the idea that he has, and we developed it with all the team.
So Ramón Acedo is the art director, Manu is there too, and we have plenty of guys of Tequila and Blizzard and Mercury's team working together in this AA-size team."
"And we want just to take the wave of these new developers that are taking a little bit a step forward to control their products and to offer something cool.
And that's the whole thing about Vercors, is rising a little bit from the ashes of the Tequila meltdown and picking the persons that we like and build with them amazing games."
"Fantastic. Another game that you're involved in with is Toymaker.
And we learned about it, I think it was last year's Barcelona Game Fest or previous years' IndieDevDay, I don't remember.
But it was interesting to us personally, also my colleague Alberto is from Salamanca, of course, and you know the other day here we had Tomás Hijo and we were talking about the legends in Salamanca, the cave and all that sort of lore and fantasy that is related to that."
"And I also like the concept and the gameplay where you have to make your own toy.
So just a little brief update on the status of the project and also on what you added in terms of a narrative here."
"The project is coming, we are working very hard to wrap it up in the next months of this 2026, so we are fully on it.
The project is going to be a quite big golden path story.
Think about it as not a five hours game, this is going to be more ambitious in that regard."
"And what I did for the project was narrative direction and also quest design.
So the quest and the narrative and the storytelling is on my side and we play a mixture between a setting of a historical setting with people like Unamuno and all the setting that you can imagine of the early 20th century inside Salamanca with the legend of the cave and a sort of supernatural background story that is linked to characters that I cannot spoil, but you are going to see the master and the lady through the game and you are going to learn what happens with them."
"We will even have crazy things like time travel and all of that and we are going to explore that through the making of the toys because making toys is bringing dreams to the people but in their own hands could be also the means to bring nightmares."
"So we are playing with that.
I thought this was going to be cosy, so you are telling me that there is going to be a little bit of a darker twist to it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah."
"Of course.
I should have expected that.
The game is going to be beautiful and cosy as you see and in fact we are aiming to have a PG rate but we want to tell a story that matters and that starts in the early century but hints of what the 20th century is going to be about and just around the corner is the civil war and Guernica and the World War II and we are going to tackle that and even the dictatorship of Franco."
"So the game is going to tie to those subjects without becoming something a child couldn't play but it's going to give a history lesson of what happens next in Spain.
Interesting."
"And you mentioned your past with Tequila Works and also you had some time with Mercury's team.
Almost four years.
Four years working on Blades of Fire, if I'm correct."
"So as you already mentioned Tequila, from these two big Spanish studios, probably some of the most important in the past decades in Spain, which is your takeaway?
Which is the lesson learned that you are now bringing to more indie sort of approach?
So the main takeaway will be the commitment."
"I think what you learn of being in a team of 30 plus 40 or even as Blades of Fire, plus 100 people and you are in a relevant position inside those teams because you are in charge of the narrative or the quest or whatever, is the commitment to fulfill things of great quality in a constrained amount of time."
"I think that's the biggest lesson that I learned in both projects, in Blades of Fire and Song of Nunu.
One was different to the other because in one I have to have a beautiful collaboration with a publisher."
"I totally love collaborating with Riot.
And in the other we were developing our IP with 505 Games and with plenty of freedom.
Following the lead of Enric, that was the creative director."
"So the main thing connecting those two experiences, to take the skill of managing teams and people in general in a constrained amount of time because even three years pass like a breeze and be able to perform very high in a short amount of time."
"I think in that we are now in Vercors [Games], we have a super talented team that can do very quickly things of a quality that is just about to hit the market and we are developing the games super fast."
"I think that's what the industry needs now.
We don't need games that follow a development cycle of five years.
We need to be able to hit the market as our peers in Super NES and Mega Drive did."
"So maybe not in five months, but I think two years will be more than enough to do a final product.
More manageable.
All right, let me ask you about books."
"I think your latest book is around here and it released recently.
In English it would be called something like Seven in the Darkness.
It's an anthology, it's seven stories, seven horror stories."
"I haven't read it yet, sorry about that.
But I have read the synopsis and it's, you know, every story you sort of summarize is like more twisted and more confusing than the previous one."
"They're all character based.
You focus at least on the description, on the characters themselves and then all sorts of very weird things happen to them.
So, yeah, what do you want to express here?
And what can you tell me about the format?
About working with seven shorter stories and perhaps give me your favorite or the creepiest one that people are telling you, you know, that the fourth is I cannot even keep reading."
"I think, you know, the main thing of the book is death.
After writing The Third Side of the Moon, that was like my big breakthrough literally and it was very well regarded."
"I write another 40 stories or something like that and I have to start looking at them and see if I have a book inside them.
And I have two."
"I have one that is lighter, like more hopeful and that's not the book I released.
And I have other that is darker, which is Seven in Darkness.
And it's about death and it's about a reflection of death during our whole lives."
"So the start of the book is about children and the end of the book is about old men.
So each story is, you know, evolving the age of the character.
Yeah, and the passage of time."
"But all they are confronted with the fact of death and how to deal with it.
My favorite is called Textures and it's a love story between two girls in Paris with a supernatural big twist related to a covenant of witches that are in the Andes that I completely made up."
"I think they are very cool.
And the creepiest one, everyone tells me this, is probably Polybius.
Polybius is an adaptation of the urban legend about the video game that plays with your dramas."
"You will see some connections with Tuned In, of course.
And this story is pretty disturbing because it's about two brothers that they love each other but Polybius gets in and suddenly one of the brothers loses his mind and does something terrible."
"And it's the revenge story of the other brother against the company that built that game.
Which is it in terms of the number of the story?
It's the second one."
"And a little bird told me that perhaps there is a link or a nod or a cameo or a sort of a reference in the game you're working on.
Yeah, yeah, yeah."
"If you look at the brand of the TV, the brand that is engraved on the frame of the TV, it's the word Sinneslöschen, which is bad German.
But, you know, Abdul Alhazred, it wasn't good Arab, and it's one of the favorite characters of all time, the writer of the Necronomicon."
"So Sinneslöschen is a company that's supposed to build Polybius and supposed to be Lord TV.
And that's the nod.
Balrog was never a good name for a Spaniard in Street Fighter."
"And then Vega was someone else, if you guys didn't know.
Yeah.
All right.
And finally, I wanted to ask you about this event, Celsius 232, and sort of what you guys are doing here."
"I'm pretty impressed, and I think authors as well love sort of the energy here, the passion.
They get to meet the readers, but also they get to meet each other and then to understand and to absorb from other authors."
"And you've been doing this for 15 years, which is crazy.
And now you're gathering, you know, it's just the creators of the worlds we know and love, not only in books, but also in movies and also in video games and in comics."
"So that's why we were super interested in covering it.
From all the conversations you guys had on stage and during the panels, which would you say is the takeaway this year?
Which would you say is the main message they are conveying to audiences?
You know, talking about how they write and how they create nowadays, with, of course, all the challenges I'm sure have been mentioned, which would you say is that headline from Celsius 2026?
I would say that it's a reflection or a thought that Ted Chiang shared with us, and we all agree with it, which is that genres are not a set of rules that you follow, like archetypes, tropes, and all of that, but it's an ongoing conversation between people."
"And this is a place where we gather and talk.
So I think we have to start to think about genres, horror, science fiction, and whatever, in this human way.
Like, what is a genre, a horror genre?
It's a conversation between people that love horror, talk with each other, agree or disagree about topics, and evolve those topics through a conversation that happens in real time in places like this, like Celsius, but it happens also when you are at home reading your peers and thinking about their art."
"He told us something very similar, and it was one of our highlights, for sure.
Ted Chiang, take it out at your local Gamereactor site very soon.
So lastly, what can we expect from Celsius going forward?
Can we expect it to return next year?
Do you know anything about this?
You had an amazing list of guests this year."
"I think it's 80 or something.
We managed to interview like 21 or 22, which is an achievement as well.
It's an achievement by itself."
"But it's a temptation already to keep coming here.
So what can you tell me about the expectations for future years?
Well, I think what we have to do always is, Jorge Iván always tells us, the director of the festival, is try to make the snapshot of every year."
"That's our main responsibility.
We have to take the picture of what is fantasy, horror, and sci-fi every year in video games, in comics, in everything.
So that will be the goal for next year."
"Always look into the past also, you know, our grandmasters that are still around should come here in every discipline to teach what they learned, but also the snapshot of what's going on."
"So you can imagine that I'm following very closely things like Pragmata, Mina the Hollower, and these games that are doing great this year.
So my goal is always having one or two of the big ones that did very good this year, and that will be the goal for next year too."
"This year we talked Exodus, and we talked Expedition 33, and we talked the Blood of Dawnwalker.
So there's been a lot of video game talent here as well this year.
That's all. Thank you so much for your time, Ángel."
"I'm already looking forward to next year's Celsius, and to play that little WarioWare, twisted take you guys had.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much, David."
"And I hope that everyone that tune in for our TV gets a really good jump scare. Thank you."
