For better or for worse, the MediEvil remake will have some changes from the original game. In a recent interview, Mike Mika, Other Ocean Interactive's chief creative officer, sat down to chat with Games Radar to discuss the vision behind the project and what they sought to (re)create.
The team working on the remake is also responsible for creating Rick And Morty: Virtual Rick-Ality and Thimbleweed Park, which is a great sign, since MediEvil had its fair share of subtle humor in its overall tone. Mika stated, “One of the challenges to resurrecting a game like MediEvil […] is you don’t want to deliver an exact replica of that original game, you want to deliver the game that people remember playing.”
This goal, as Mika goes on to elaborate, focuses on giving players their needed feeling of nostalgia, but also creating a game that is fun to play today, more than two decades following the release of the original game.
An interesting part of this process lies in the development team’s exploration of the original source code. There, they found content, such as bosses, which were never included in the original release, but have now been reworked for the remake. In this way, Mika and his team are in fact creating less of a remake, and more the complete original vision of the first developers.
Most of the game’s mechanics seem to be largely intact. In the original and the remake, players must find weapons to upgrade their personal arsenal and expand their toolkits. Weapons will degrade over time, and some are limited in usage. Players will often visit the Hall Of Heroes, exactly like the original, to learn the history of the world and be poked fun at by other heroes who have already earned their spot among the bravest warriors in history.
While it has not been alluded to directly in much detail, the remake does appear to contain the Chalice of Souls from the original game. These items would gradually fill in each level of the game with the souls of the opponents trying to stop the player, and once filled, could be located and collected. Since these were hidden away and required a player to defeat most opponents in a level, it was no easy task to collect them all. However, doing so would gain a player the best possible ending, along with a full array of weapons and armor.
While the mechanics feel familiar, new levels and opponents appear to be the largest differences between the original game and the remake. This might strike the perfect balance between finding that level of nostalgia that old players will crave and giving everyone something enjoyable to do.
Source: gamesradar.com