Breaking Through
Shadow Complex

When you talk to them, Donald and Geremy Mustard remind you of Peter Pan. The brothers and co-creators behind Shadow Complex, XBLA’s most popular single-player game ever, don’t confess a need to tell an epic story or make the perfect action game. They bring up stories of their youth. The two siblings sharing the captain’s seat at Chair Entertainment helped us retrace our steps through one of the best takes on retro game design we’ve ever played.

OXM: Shadow Complex reminded us how much we missed exploration in games. Why is exploring an environment in 2D more entertaining than it is in 3D?

Donald Mustard: That’s one of the things that stood out to us in the past few years: We weren’t feeling the same sense of explorational fulfillment out of these rich, 3D worlds that we felt as kids exploring 2D worlds. The big reason I think [the design of 2D] games works so well is that you’re able to clue in players with so many parts of the environment and it gives you a different perspective on the world where you can be, y’know, crawling through a vent and see your player, but also see into the room below you. It kind of allows you to have that extra-sensory discovery; if you’re playing in first-person, you could never get that window.

Geremy Mustard: The Mario and Zelda games do a good job of encouraging exploration. But one thing 3D games do a lot of is directing your attention to a spot where you have to go. That’s why we see these mini-cutscenes where you walk into a room and the camera will leave the player for a second to indicate exactly where you’re supposed to go. And your objective as a player is to figure out how to get there. But that kind of takes away from the exploration that’s so fun — it’s one of the best things about older games. We didn’t have to hold the player’s hand as much — we could allow them to discover on their own and evoke those emotions of exploring.

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