HOLLOWMERE (Concept)

A game reveal trailer that refuses the fake review quote

A game announce fails in one specific, expensive way: it looks wonderful all the way through and the viewer still cannot say what kind of game it is. This one answers it in the running head: the genre sits beside a small lit glyph in the top-left corner of every one of its five plates, so from the moment the first plate lands to the end of the last one the question is never open. It is worth being exact about the edges — the opening, which is an ink blot spreading on black, carries no head, and the head clears again for the closing brand card. Opposite it a plate number advances, and each one names the job of the plate it heads: the first door, the living chart, the screen-print register, below the ninth door, and the title. A reveal filed as a numbered set of inked plates rather than cut as a sequence of shots, which is the form an illustrated indie title is actually sold in.

The world arrives as a chart on cream paper with the fold shadows left in it, and the caption under it is a refusal rather than a boast: nine biomes, no markers. The title plate then prints that as a three-cell record — drawn by hand, the biome count, and a map-marker count of none — where the third cell is the word none and is the reason the film exists. Announcing what a game does not have only works if the art has already earned the confidence, and the plates spend the runtime earning it: one teal ink against near-black and paper, three location cards that get a biome number, a name and two lines each, and a creature revealed as a silhouette with two lit eyes. It withholds deliberately, which is what a reveal is for.

The closing line is the one to read twice. It marks the film studio spec work for a game that does not exist, and then it names the specific dishonesty of its own category and rules it out: no fabricated reviews, no ratings, no sales claims. Announce trailers carry invented pull-quotes and invented scores routinely, and mocking one up costs nothing — which is precisely why writing the refusal onto the card is worth something. There are none anywhere in the piece, and the only thing it asks for is a wishlist, the honest ask for a title with no release. The report-film that burns its concept label into the running head protects the same promise a different way, by making the label survive the clip leaving the site.

More key art work from the studio

Blue Snow Developers makes the games work here the way it makes everything — by hand, from real material, in one engine. Browse every games piece in the portfolio, see key art among everything the studio makes, or read the studio's own identity system — the design tokens, type scale and motion rules behind HOLLOWMERE (Concept) and everything else here. When the brief is clear, talk to us about key art.

HOLLOWMERE (Concept) is filed under games. Read next: what a product engineer actually does, the rest of the studio's field notes, and a film studio run by an engineer.