Orune Is a Narrative Heavy Platformer About a Boy and His Dragon

Digital Pine Studios, the team behind the Google Play game Internet Exploder, have a brand new game coming up that I was fortunate enough to play during my time at EGX 2018, which you can see more coverage of here at VGR.

Orune is best described as a story-heavy platformer, and players will be in the shoes of the protagonist Cyrus. You’ll be accompanied by a dragon named Orune, who will be your most loyal ally throughout the game.

Along with my time playing the game, I was also lucky enough to sit down and talk to Karim Abouelkawam, the Programmer/Director behind Orune, about what the team’s plans are for the game and when could we be expecting a release date.


Aimee Hart: Thank you so much for sitting down and speaking to me about Orune. How would you describe Orune for those who have never heard of the game before, but are intrigued in playing it?

Karim Abouelkawam: Orune is a 2.5D story-heavy platformer and the theme is fairytales. In our game the story is that, a long time ago, a princess and her family were rebelled against and so she ended up running away. It didn’t end up too well for her, as she ended up living in exile.

One hundred years later we see a prince, Cyrus, experience the same thing. He runs away, but when he is exiled he finds a friend, the dragon Orune. Their bonds helped one another to survive and live in exile together. On the other hand, the princess had no support system, and so took a different path from Cyrus and Orune to the point that she’s now looking for revenge for what happened to her.

Really what Orune is about is the moral of friendship and how it can help you through rough times.

Orune

AH: I really love the style of Orune. It looks brilliant how the 2.5D transforms into 3D.

KA: We designed the levels all in 3D. Because we design all the levels in 3D we are able to move the camera in any way that we want to, and it allows us to tell the story we want to in full 3D too.

AH: I think it really works because the setting is just beautiful. But I have to ask, what made you decide to make Orune a dragon? Did you want any other creature or did you always want to make this a story about Cyrus and a dragon?

KA: We wanted to make a narrative-heavy, platformer game that filled the gap that games like Limbo and Ori and the Blind Forest left behind. Very recent games like Sea of Solitude gained a lot of traction from the audience just from being in that genre, even with people seeing nothing else about it, which showed us that there was a demand for story-heavy indie games. Of course, triple-A games like The Last of Us is a whole other market, but we want to fill this market with a game like Orune.

Mostly we wanted to have a story about relationships. There’s a lot of stories out there about you saving someone or something, and we wanted to do a relationship about friendship, but we didn’t to do it with another human. People tend to find animals more relatable at times, so we chose a dragon because there’s a lot of possibilities with a dragon. Everyone – hopefully – knows what a dragon is, they can breathe fire, they can fly, and that gives the player a lot of options on how they can do things. Orune (the dragon) is on a visual AI, so he does do his own thing. So, he can breathe fire, help you fly over objects and help you move some things that are heavy.

We didn’t want to include an animal like a dog, because we felt that was far too cliche and we wanted to fit the fairytale fantasy.

Orune

AH: You mentioned how narrative-heavy Orune is. There’s been talk by certain companies that ‘narrative-heavy’ games simply don’t sell anymore. I assume you don’t agree with that.

KA: You get companies like EA who say that. Then you see games like God of War and Spider-Man which are single-player games that focus a lot on story, and as you know they’ve done incredibly well. EA can’t really say the same for Star Wars Battlefront 2, can they? [laughs]

AH: You have a point there!

KA: On the indie side of things, you’ve got games like Limbo and Inside selling over 800,000 copies. For an indie game? That’s a lot. So any story game that even gets a fraction of that success is considered successful. So to say that single-player narratives aren’t successful is just an excuse to promote monetization and microtransactions, which we don’t agree with. Orune won’t be anything like that, and if we have DLC in the future then it’ll be completely free.

AH: When I was playing Orune it seemed as though there were a lot of individual choices. Is the game choice heavy? Are there two different endings? That kind of thing.

KA: Ah no, the story is very linear. We do have choices in the game, such as Cyrus being able to choose different things to say. So we do have small choices that affect certain events in the game, but there is just one ending. We’ve kind of taken the route of games like The Last Of Us, where we think the story is really good and we want to tell it how it is, we don’t want it to change.

AH: I was wondering about Cyrus and his relationship with Orune. You said that you bolster the relationship with Orune through interactions in-game, rather than cutscenes.

KA: The aim of the game is to build that relationship through the gameplay. Cyrus will go off and do puzzles, and Orune will help in whatever way that it can. We don’t want to rely on cutscenes, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be any. There are cutscenes, but they are only there to develop the game’s background and to give context.

There are moments where your relationship with Orune can be seen, like there’s a puzzle where you’ll need Orune’s help and if he doesn’t have a lot of respect for you then it’ll be harder to complete. You have to work with Orune to develop the relationship, which makes it more organic rather than just showing them being loving in a cutscene. No, we want to show that development through gameplay.

Orune

AH: When I played the game there only seemed to be spiders for enemies. Will there be other enemies involved?

KA: We do have more enemies to come. Yes, in fact, we have quite a few enemies but I don’t want to spoil what they are just yet. There will be boss battles too, dragons too.

In terms of gameplay, I’d say that Orune is a very casual RPG. So, you can get different weapons that don’t necessarily have different stats, but they look different. Same goes for outfits. The level you played on was actually what we’d call the HUB for the world. It’s more open-world at times.  So yes, the gameplay is very light-RPG.

AH: What would you say is the average completion time for Orune?

KA: We are aiming for a pretty small game. So I’d say the average completion time is around 6 hours.

AH: Do you believe that’s enough time to tell the story you want?

KA: Yes. The story has a lot of things going on. The entire middle of our story, where Cyrus and Orune come together, is very important as Orune doesn’t talk. There’s no dialogue between them. So it’s just being able to tell a story through their interactions, without having to rely on dialogue.

AH: I noticed that you could throw swords and Orune, being the good dragon that he is, goes and fetches it for you. Is there anything else Orune can do? Cyrus, as well?

KA: Yes we do have more interactions that we are looking to put in. The purpose of the dragon is to help you. He can carry you over obstacles, push heavy objects, light things on fire and can also help in combat if you need him to. For the purpose of the demo, we let Orune run wild just because we wanted people to see what he can do. The more interactions between Orune and Cyrus, the more you can do.

Orune

AH: That’s interesting. Are there any other characters involved that we’ll get to know about, or is this really just about Cyrus and Orune?

KA: There are other characters involved, but the main relationship really is just about Cyrus and Orune. At the beginning of the game, Cyrus starts off in the castle with his father King Cedric. At that time, there is no Orune as they’ve not met just yet. The prologue then goes on to show what happened to Cyrus and his family, how he went into exile, etc.

Of course, you do meet others throughout the story. There are nomads, for example, that help you out at one point and help develop Cyrus’ character arc. So there are other characters there that give objectives to you, but they aren’t as pivotal as Cyrus and Orune.

AH: What sort of puzzles are there? Say that I don’t like puzzles, can I still enjoy Orune for what it is?

KA: The puzzles are not too hard. But if players do find it difficult, we are looking to implement hints and whatnot to pop up if you are perhaps taking too long on a puzzle. We’re looking to make an accessible game that people will enjoy, regardless of whether they like puzzles or not. We don’t want things to be hardcore.

AH: What platforms will we find Orune on?

KA: PC, Xbox One, PS4, and Nintendo Switch. We’re looking for a September sometime in the future. So we will be at EGX again next year.

AH: Well I look forward to talking to you again next year. Thank you for your time!