Revealed today was a new game based on the Planet of the Apes franchise, which will be one of the only videogames ever based on the popular franchise. Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier is being developed by Imaginati, the game development house of Andy Serkis' company The Imaginarium. Serkis of course is the veteran actor and motion capture artist who performed Caesar in all three recent Apes movies, and he'll serve as Executive Producer on the title.
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Set between Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and this summer's War for the Planet of the Apes, the game doesn't actually follow Caesar's apes but actually a breakaway group of apes, taking refuge in the Rocky Mountains and trying to avoid getting involved in the human-ape war that was started in Dawn. Gameplay-wise Last Frontier takes its cues from Telltale's titles such as The Walking Dead, a "cinematic adventure" where there is choice in how the story progresses and consequences to your actions.
Imaginati are aiming for greater parity between games and films, with the game being movie-length at just 2-3 hours and with the player's input being entirely choice-based, with none of the exploratory moments or small puzzles you'd see in a Telltale game, Heavy Rain or Life Is Strange. While that may not sound good, Imaginati are intending to have a greater volume of choices than any similar adventure, with their goal to have a dialogue or action choice every 15-20 seconds and multiple endings that require replays. There's no opening drawers, minor actions or making your character walk an inch and click on something to trigger a cutscene.
Imaginati founder Martin Alltimes explains their focus:
"The pace of the storytelling is just super-intense compared to any of these other games. It's all about you making choices that affect relationships with other characters and, in the long term, how those relationships play out, and how the story plays out. It's a creative risk, but when we talked to everyone on the team, they really believed in it. It would have been very easy for us to copy what had gone before... The roots of what we've done is built on the heritage of Quantic Dreams’ or Telltale Games’ products. But we have a very specific angle. I saw the opportunity here was pure, cinematic-style storytelling, rather than traditional console storytelling."
The game itself will be built on Unreal technology, and much like the movies will contain fully motion-captured actors to allow for the most realistic animation possible at all times, even action scenes that required stunt actors. Quantic Dreams veteran Steve Kniebihly will frame and direct every shot, allowing for movie-like vision but also meaning that processing power can be put towards smaller details. As you can see in the trailer below or in this 6 minute gameplay video, it's not quite photorealistic but it certainly looks very delicious indeed.
While we're concerned about any game that claims to be "cinematic" and aiming to be close to movie-like, as that's usually a recipe for a game with little gameplay and overlong cutscenes, Planet of the Apes is such an excellent series with so few videogames despite being one of the longest-running franchises around (it predates both Star Trek and Star Wars) that it deserves a good one at least.
We'll have more on Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier very soon.
