Three years ago everything was about to change for small Australian studio Witch Beam. It was preparing to launch its second game – a game about unpacking boxes and finding a place for your stuff. Unpacking, it was called. And it was hoped to build on the success of the studio’s first game, Assault Android Cactus, an energetic twin-stick shooter that did relatively well. But there was concern, because how many people would want a casual object placement game? How many people would understand what this is trying to do?
Witch Beam need not fear. In just one year, Unpacking has reached millions of sales – far, far beyond anything Assault Android Cactus could do. This shot the studio to fame. Eurogamer won Unpacking Game of the Year 2021 and Unpacking won awards including two BAFTA Game Awards. It was an undisputed success for Witch Beam. “It was life-changing,” co-founder Sanatana Mishra tells me now. “We’ve spent ten years following our creative passion and weighing every little decision with the possibility of getting leaner at the end of the journey, and it’s been a tough time. We’ve traded in our youth and our health in a way that’s only really possible once or twice in your life, you can’t just keep doing it, and then now, overnight, after 10 years of doing it, we didn’t have to think about it anymore, it’s been life-changing for everyone in the team and everyone we work with, it’s been fantastic. “
And now the team is back with a new game called Tempopo.
Tempopo is as different from unboxing as unboxing is from Assault Android Cactus. It’s a puzzle game again, yes, but this time it’s about guiding bouncing creatures around dense garden obstacle courses while music plays around you. “Planning and executing is the loop that the game has,” explains Mishra, who created the concept with his friend Seiji Tanaka, who was once the animator of the legendary game Journey. They came up with the idea at a game jam while thinking about “evolutionary dead ends,” of all things. Think saber-toothed tigers. “Why does it die but not another animal?” asks Mishra.
With game genres or certain game ideas, it’s similar in Misra’s opinion. “When I look at these classic games that I love – Lemmings and ChuChu Rocket! – I’m like, “Why aren’t these things interesting to people anymore?” What decisions did that mean – in the way that people expect games to exist now – that game doesn’t work?” And perhaps more importantly, following on from this idea, “Is there another way could it have mutated and been incredibly successful?” That’s where the core of the Tempopo idea came from. But it wasn’t until Witch Beam co-founder and songwriter Jeff van Dyck got involved that it really took on the musical form we see now.
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The core of Tempopo should be easy to grasp. You are on a mission to find magical singing flowers and bring them back to the garden where you will create a kind of soundscape. “Planning and executing is the loop that the game has,” says Mishra. You issue instructions to the chubby creatures before the level starts, and when you’re satisfied, you start the level to see if they can carry it out successfully. There is no real-time input. If you want to change something because your plan didn’t work, you start over. But there is no stress.
“I want to try to avoid the problems I have with a lot of games, especially in the puzzle space, where I feel a huge amount of anxiety playing them,” says Mishra. “I feel judged because I constantly feel like I’m somehow not good enough for the game.” He says he hears people say all the time that they ‘can’t do puzzle games’ and it annoys him. “We’re all innately good at puzzle games,” he tells me. “It’s literally part of our evolutionary biology. But we constantly feel this kind of anxiety that the game is saying, ‘Oh, maybe you should have solved this a little faster; you should have done it a little faster; you should have known—you should have known how it works. .” So I’m trying to get people into this relaxed headspace,” he says.
This sense of calm follows the main theme of the play, harmony. It’s in the musical harmonies you create in your garden’s soundscape, of course, but also in the game actions you take as your bouncing balls try to help each other overcome puzzles, and in the protagonist Hannah’s journey through the game. Perhaps harmony will also be a theme that resonates with you as you play. “Once you understand the game and its elements more and start thinking a little bit more about the characters and what they’re trying to do and understand the plot in front of you, you can take that theme and run with it.” your head about how beneficial it is,” says Mishra. “I think it’s quite beneficial to think about harmony in this world anyway,” he adds. “It’s not exactly that I want to beat people over the head with it. It’s just a core element of what the game is about.”
These deeper themes are reminiscent of what Unpacking did so well, which was to be – on the face of it – a puzzle game about unpacking boxes and finding a place for items, but underneath also being a game that tells the story of someone’s life. A story that was subtly very moving and that’s why it resonated so much with so many of us. But while Tempopo has deeper themes, “it’s quite a different experience,” Mishra points out. It’s worth noting here that Unpacking lead creator Wren Brier is not working on the project. “Wren is taking a break from development,” says Mishra. “She and Tim [Dawson, the third Witch Beam co-founder] they’re partners, so they live together, still do stuff and all, but Wren desperately needs a break. She worked incredibly hard on Unpacking, and then it came out and we did different versions on other platforms and interviews and events and different things. Now he’ll recharge before starting something new.”
Second, Witch Beam never wanted Tempopo to be the same kind of game. They discussed doing Unpacking 2 because people asked the studio for it – and still do – but the discussions never got very far. “We had about a 10-second conversation about it. We were like, ‘We don’t want to do this,'” he says. “We thought it was a complete game that stood on its own. In other words, the idea was done and the studio didn’t want to go back to their old ways and become known for just one thing. “If anything,” he says, “I’d say our creative brand is that there’s no single theme that always runs through everything—it’s entirely about what we find exciting and interesting at the time.” Usually, if someone is passionate enough to see an idea through, “that’s enough to get everyone else on board.”
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Mishra actually likens Witch Beam’s way of working to an art collective, in that the core of the studio—the three founders—remains the same, but the collaborators on individual projects change. Unpacking’s Wren Brier was technically a collaborator, as was Tempopo co-creator Seiji Tanaka. “And based on how the project is going, we try to make sure that the success goes back to the people who work with us,” says Mishra. The success of Unpacking, for example, has not only benefited Witch Beam, but also the wider development scene in Queensland, Australia. “That’s why I said earlier that despite our success, we’re staying small because we want to be the ones making games, and then we’ll try to use that success to empower our local developers to make their games.”
So Witch Beam didn’t bet on Tempopo repeating the huge success of Unpacking, which is a relief. In theory, I imagine it could run for years just from the income of this game. But the feeling of pressure that comes with great success cannot be escaped. “There’s absolutely a sense that you’ve done a successful thing, so now everything else you ever do will be measured against what you did before,” says Mishra. “And that’s kind of scary from a creative standpoint. Because what if you don’t follow through – does that mean you’re failing in some way? It’s disheartening. “But whenever I focus too much on that pressure,” he adds, “I think it’s only coming because we’re in a position that everybody wants to be in.” He recalls, “It’s so incredibly privileged to be in this place.”
Tempopo is in development for PC, Switch and Xbox and has a loose release target of this year.