That’s pretty, that. I know Moomins mostly from the 90s cartoon, only a little from the books, but oh it’s very nice. What a strange and beautiful tone. It always scared or unsettled me a little, and I like that. A few years back, our Graham wrote very nicely about how it’s fun to think about a Moomin video game, and what any such game shouldn’t be. In this particular game, Snufkin will be exploring an open world, solving musical and environmental puzzles, doing side quests, and, the blurb says, ultimately chasing out the Park Keeper and his parks “with the help of your trusty harmonica, a bit of stealth, and the friends you’ll meet along the way.” “Please don’t. Moomin adventures resist structure, and rarely contain any kind of objective. Any travels and the events that happen during them are mostly about happenstance, undertaken out of a desire to entertain oneself and one’s friends. A quest, a marker, a reward; all of these are antithetical to the spirit of the Moomin stories, which are fundamentally about nature, and treat everything its characters do with the same level of importance as a tree shedding its leaves. That is, very important and not important at all, all at once.” Snufkin: Melody Of Moominvalley is due to hit Steam in 2023. It’ll also be on yet-unspecified consoles. It’s made by Hyper Games, the Norwegian studio previously behind cooperative puzzle game Mørkredd.
