The only real change Night School made designing for the service? Make players feel comfortable taking a break every ten minutes or so. Conversations and player choices change the arc of the plot, but it’s easy to play on any of Apple Arcade’s devices. Krankel describes the ‘space game’ Next Stop Nowhere as a classic American road trip set amongst the stars, following courier Beckett and companion Serra as they drive a ‘space Winnebago’ through the cosmic expanse on a search for the latter’s son. This space game that we’ve been kicking around would be a good fit, especially if we don’t need to cram in monetization hooks that we frankly are not good at.” “We weren’t just hitting art house gamer people and horror gamer people, but now on iOS we’re reaching tweens who read creepypasta and a much broader audience. But then the studio’s debut title that started on PC, Oxenfree, hit iOS - and reached a new audience. “I was fairly dubious that a premium game could still survive in this world,” said Sean Krankel, co-founder of Night School Games. Next Stop Nowhere from Night School Studio, the second of the trio, is also exclusive to Apple Arcade, though it’s fair to say that the developer’s house style - free-flowing conversations while exploring to further the story, as pioneered in the indie hit Oxenfree and follow-up Afterparty - fits Arcade so well that it’s no wonder Apple warmly received Night School’s pitch for a new game. As an exclusive on Apple Arcade, it’s a win for the service. Martin’s supplementary books) to come out in years. And with the Telltale game series cancelled years ago, it’s one of the only Game of Thrones media (aside from George R.R. “The core idea was to make it a ‘healthy’ idle game that takes this style of gameplay and uses it in a way that can fit the player’s life, as opposed to trying to just keep them hooked constantly on the screen,” Hollands said.Īs a result, Tale of Crows is low-key, even meditative - and set 8,000 years before the characters and events from the show, we found it gave players enough distance from the divisive HBO series while retaining the flavor of its fantasy universe. But the service’s no-microtransactions let the game’s creator Jake Hollands craft it as a seamless experience without worrying about intrusive monetization alerts - and unlike other idle games, Tale of Crows has an ending. Game of Thrones: Tale of Crows, for instance, was conceived as an idle game before Devolver Digital approached Apple to include it in Arcade. These are existing perks of Apple Arcade - but other principles of the service guided the games, too. And the simpler controls make the games easier for younger players to pick up - players, like children or friends, who don’t have to pay for the games if they’re linked up to a subscriber’s family plan. That makes them suitable for the touch controls on iPhones and iPads, the remote for Apple TV, or mouse/touchpad on Macs (though all Apple operating systems support PS4 and Xbox One controllers, some subscribers likely won’t go through the trouble). TechRadar briefly sat down with teams from all three games to chat and discuss how they fit what Apple was looking for in Arcade titles - and shed light on why other games don’t.īroadly, all three slower-paced games that rely on narrative and stylized visuals rather than fast action and twitchy response time. The other two come from studios with similar pedigrees: Next Stop Nowhere was made by Night School Studio (Oxenfree), while The Last Campfire comes from Hello Games (No Man’s Sky). The first to arrive on the service is even based on a very popular IP – Game of Thrones: Tale of Crows, an idle narrative game from Devolver Digital. The three new games released in August 2020 came from well-known developers and publishers.
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