Gloomywood CEO on trying to make a game on serious topics

"It's also a question of fun."

Gloomywood's 2Dark dealt with some difficult topics when it was released earlier this year, and at Gamelab Montevideo we caught up with CEO Thierry Platon to talk about the studio and the game in particular, asking what stories Gloomywood is interested in telling.

"Well the last game [...] at Gloomywood, 2Dark, talked about serial killers kidnapping children, and we tried to talk about this difficult subject of children disappearing, and there is more than, if my memory's good, 800,000 children who disappear every year without any news, nobody finds them, and it's just for slavery, organ traffic, rape - just horrible, nobody talks about that," he said. "We made a video game about that. We tried."

We then asked whether we can expect the studio to try difficult and serious stories moving forward, to which Platon said:

"Not always. It's difficult for your mind. We spent three years with 2Dark, and honestly after three years I was completely fed up with serial killers and black stories and detective stories [...] and for one year I stopped completely."

In terms of the message of games, the importance for Platon is to "control it, and to manage it [...] it's also a question of fun. I mean, you're here to have fun."

How do you think games should address serious issues, if indeed they should at all?