At PAX West 2019, Destructoid’s Brett Makedonski sat down to play Stela, the cinematic platformer about a young woman witnessing the final days of a mysterious ancient world, and chatted with developer SkyBox Labs. Makedonski and Stela producer Aubrey Tennant discussed the upcoming game’s cinematic flair and apocalyptic platforming flair, touching on film inspirations and gameplay aspirations.
The descriptor “cinematic” is fitting, which is fortunate, because it’s entirely what developer SkyBox Labs was aiming for. Citing the likes of Lord of the Rings‘ majestic pulled-out establishing shots of the Fellowship crossing a mountain range, producer Aubrey Tennant tells Destructoid “We really like when platformers have a deeper world and more scale. At points, we pull the camera back so the character looks a little smaller so we can try to bring out the world.”
During the short demo we played, we were treated to many examples of how this all coalesces. Stela‘s chilling, gangly, biped-but-also-sometimes-quadruped monsters dashed from the background to the foreground, right past us as we cowered behind a tree. Other times, the camera pans way out to accentuate how dire all this is.
Stela comes to Xbox One on Oct. 17, 2019, with Apple Arcade and PC releases in the near future. For more information, please visit the official website and read Destructoid’s complete coverage.
