THE SIEGE AND THE SANDFOX

A stealth adventure seeking inspiration from genre royalty

- 

Well, ‘stealth Metroidvania inspired by Prince Of Persia’ is quite the elevator pitch. But The Siege And The Sandfox’s development journey really began with some beautiful concept art created by artists and twin brothers Ed and Keith Duke-Cox, who left Frontier Developments to join northern English studio Cardboard Sword in 2016. “We looked at it and we were blown away,” the studio’s chief executive, Olly Bennett, recalls. “It was stunning pixel art. Bear in mind, this is the first pixel-art game project they’ve ever worked on. And we saw it, and we were like, ‘Well, this is fantastic. We’ll turn this into a game’.”

From the outset, the developer decided it wanted to adopt a pure stealth approach, which means that unlike in, say, Assassin’s Creed, there’s no option for simply murdering anyone who happens to get in your way. “The whole point is that your character is an elite assassin,” Bennett says, “and when you’re an assassin, you have a single target. You’re paid to kill one person or you have a motivation to kill one specific target. And you should not be killing indiscriminately to get to that point, otherwise you’re just a mass murderer. And so to get to that target, an elite assassin should not be detected, not leave a pile of corpses or a path of blood.”