Following the success of Mouthwashing, developer Wrong Organ wasn’t ready to make a better ‘story game,’ so it’s making a ‘gameplay game’ instead
Ahead of co-op tank sim Carcass Clad’s reveal trailer at the PC Gaming Show, I got to speak to Wrong Organ devs Jeffrey Tomec and Dave van Egdom about the studio’s upcoming third game. The elephant in the room: Carcass Clad is a huge departure from the studio’s breakout hit, Mouthwashing, a singleplayer narrative horror game.
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“This game is a statement in some ways, it could seem weird,” said Tomec. “We made a story game and you loved it, but now we’re doing something [that’s] nothing like that, and to an extent, there’s a little bit that we definitely don’t want to pigeonhole ourselves.”
There are definitely commonalities between Mouthwashing and Carcass Clad, the things that Tomec and the others feel are essential to a Wrong Organ game: Themes of dehumanization, innovative deployments of gore and body horror, plus a sense of the mundane gone wrong, a workplace transplanted to an impossible situation. But written narrative is taking more of a backseat.
In addition to wanting to prove something about Wrong Organ, Tomec admitted they also just wanted to mix things up. “Mouthwashing was like, ‘God, I wish I was making a shooter right now,'” he joked. But that seems to have come back around.
“We really liked working on Mouthwashing, and I think this deep in the development of any game, [the] grass is greener,” said Tomec. “Like, I miss working on Mouthwashing! Now that we’ve been in this tank—we just got off like, four months of just designing these little components and being like, ‘Actually, this gear doesn’t rotate this other gear correctly.'”
It sounds like a return to something more narrative-driven isn’t out of the question for Wrong Organ in the future, but Tomec thinks they needed to build more capacity and expertise to improve on their own work. “How do you make [Wrong Organ’s first game] How Fish is Made better? Well, you make it not 20 minutes long,” said Tomec. “That’s the easiest explanation. So, we made a two-hour game … But now it’s like, what’s the natural progression of Mouthwashing?
“Mouthwashing isn’t better if it’s eight hours. Probably. It’s not easy, it’s not a direct scale up. How do we fundamentally change the formula to make something that’s worth more time to the player than Mouthwashing? And in our eyes, a lot of that is finding a way to get that unique Wrong Organ vibe—our stories and our writing—and to put that into something big, into something that has a real gameplay layer and feels like a super cohesive experience.”
That sounds sick as hell, and definitely a game I want to play, but it would also be “a huge undertaking” according to Tomec. “We don’t feel ready to fully deliver that right now,” he said. “The idea is, we’re saying, ‘We made the ‘story game,’ now we make the ‘gameplay game,’ and then after that we can sit down and decide, are we ready to make the ‘gameplay story game?””
We won’t exactly be bereft waiting for that gameplay story game: Carcass Clad, the ‘just gameplay’ game, looks gnarly as hell. It does not currently have a release date, but you can wishlist the claustrophobic tank sim on Steam.
