Black Book - Interview @ Enklawa

Mrozie has interviewed Vladimir Beletsky about the Adventure RPG Black Book, which they are working on at the moment and is scheduled to be released early 2021.

EnklawaNetwork.pl: First of all, congratulations for your success on Kickstarter! Nowadays crowdfunding isn’t what it used to be and quadrupling your financial goal is something notable. What, in your opinion, was a key factor to drive such numbers?

Vladimir Beletsky: Hello, thank you! Well, I think that there wasn't one factor for a successful campaign, but several of them that clicked together. First of all: there was a long period of planning and preparation that we've made with our publishers HypetrainDigital. Then, there is a factor of the setting. There are some games that are dedicated to the mythology of unholy spirits of slavic countryside, but not nearly enough. And as far as I know, there are no games exploring northern mythology of Cherdyn' region. We have also published a playable version of the game that we've tried to polish and make as good as possible. The Prologue build showed our ability to ship the game and demonstrated our ideas in a tangible way.

EN: Well, it's actually not entirely true that there are no other games exploring mythology of aforementioned region. Mooseman, your previous title, is the next one, right? However, Black Book, at least after playing the demo, feels like another cup of tea. How would you define connection between these two games? Do you build Black Book on the back of Mooseman? Or maybe you envision them as completely different titles in terms of story and gameplay?

VB: Many creatures and beliefs from the game will be very similar and familiar to anyone from Eastern Europe, but there are some key differences. Our game is indeed bearing the connection to the Mooseman. Russian beliefs of orthodox christian colonizers of Perm in middle ages mixed with paganistic beliefs of indigenous finno-ugric people of Perm and created a very interesting mix. Our previous game tried to reconstruct the mythology of finno-ugric peoples from the time that the famous archeological findings were created called permian bronze casts. So this mixture of cultures persists and we explore this topic in a game, there are even some recurring characters from the finno-ugric past that are either happy or unhappy about christian changes.