NUTS

A squirrel-infested forest harbours unsettling implications

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Developer Joon, Pol, Muutsch, Char & Torfi

Publisher Noodlecake Games

Format PC Origin International

Release 2021

Jonatan Van Hove didn’t set out to make a game about spying on squirrels. The concept for Nuts arose from a sense of untapped possibility in the simple act of looking at and recording 3D environments. “I can create an empty world and put a camera in there and it just works,” Van Hove tells us. The choice of a forest backdrop reflects Van Hove’s admiration for seasoned indie developer Pol Clarissou. Clarissou is a connoisseur of virtual vegetation: his projects include a study of moss and an otherworldly tree mod for Skyrim. Together, he and Van Hove (aka Joon) have cultivated a landscape of moody, flat coloured silhouettes that fade eerily into the distance, trunks and boulders mixed with artificial objects such as ruined churches.

With the game set in the woods, the inclusion of squirrels was perhaps inevitable. Still, there was nothing too portentous about the animals at first. “The squirrels entered just as a thing that is fun to look at and to record with your cameras,” Van Hove says. But then he enlisted the services of