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The first time I encountered Jack King-Spooner’s work, it was when he sent me a copy of Sluggish Morss: Pattern Circus over hospital wifi late at night. The game was a bright spot in a bad time, which might seem peculiar given that Sluggish Morss often looks like a whale’s upset stomach, but it’s such a feverishly inventive creation. It blew the dust from my synapses.
The same appears true of King-Spooner’s upcoming Judero, on which he is collaborating with Soul Searching developer Talha Kaya. It casts you as a “pagan seer” armed with a big stick, who is searching the mythical Scottish borderlands for evil creatures to clobber. It looks cheerier and airier than Sluggish Morss, with a more overt emphasis on mechanics such as combat, but it has the same pickled 3am energy to it. It’s also now got a release date – 16th September – and a new trailer below.
As with many of King-Spooner’s games, Judero makes use of hand-animated stop-motion. The pagan seer with the big stick is an actual action figure, photographed in different poses to create animations – and if you think that sounds like a “primitive” way to create a video game character, next to Ye Fancy Inverse Kinematics or what-have-you, then all I can say is: wham bam, get walloped.
Judero doesn’t have time for your precious procgen walking cycles, he’s got manky clay monsters to boff. Handily, he can possess some of those leering stop-motion creatures and make use of their abilities. The full game will also include various minigames, such as a side-scrolling shmup where you fire hearts at giant crows (citation needed), together with branching dialogues and “pithy, aphoristic NPCs”.
Here’s some insight from the Steam page about the game’s visual direction.
Judero is made from handcrafted objects and bespoke figurines, animated in the stop-motion tradition. For us, this art style invokes something nostalgic; in part comical but perhaps a little bit creepy too. These real life elements are then rendered into a 3D world to evoke a unique visual style. Using this style we can bring in digital techniques like real-time lighting, shaders and post-processing effects. Cutscenes will be made using traditional stop-motion animation techniques with greater fidelity to give a more cinematic quality.
Here’s a little more on the music:
The music in Judero is an homage to traditional British folk music such as those documented by Francis James Child. Many of these songs are hundreds of years old and it has been an honour researching and learning them. We are keeping instrumentation acoustic and mostly authentic to the originals (mostly) but with contemporary arrangements and harmonies.
“I like that I don’t fully understand what’s going on with Judero after playing the demo, its blend of past and present, handcrafted and handpainted, fantastic and mundane, gentle folk and unexpectedly intense boss battles,” Alice0 (RPS in peace) wrote in 2022. She also professed herself keen to learn about Scottish Border folklore, after spending time swimming the region’s rivers, investigating its ruins, and cycling through “valleys glowing with heather”. Are you reading this, Alice0? I can just picture you wandering around the borderlands beating up stuttery gremlins with a staff.
Again, Judero is out 16th September. There’s still a demo on Steam. If you enjoy the developer’s methods, you might also like Harold Halibut.