Former Sony veteran Keiichiro Toyama – the mastermind behind Silent Hill, Siren, and Gravity Rush among others – has said that he left the company to continue making his own style of games.
In a video published on YouTube, the Bokeh Game Studio founder said that games have become a bigger affair over the last few years than ever before. And major companies like Sony aim to reach the “widest audience possible.” Toyama wants to keep a focused approach, and prefers to make games with “odd concepts” that “leave a trace.”
“My games choose their audience in a way,” he said. “I aspire to make IPs that fans can enjoy even ten, twenty years after they’re released. As I want to keep achieving this under the right conditions, I thought that it was a necessity to have my own studio.”
Inspired by comic books and “dark, death” themes, Toyama said that his upcoming horror game will be “quite dark” and he wants players to feel “exhilarated” when playing it.
“One trait of my games is the setting, what city or village do we evolve in, how did these people get there, what’s their emotional state,” he continued. “This is how I approach games. I’ve been inspired by locations this time as well and started with that. I’m roaming through maps, trying various methods to build up the setting.”
While Bokeh Game Studios is keeping its project tightly under wraps, Toyama has hinted that it’ll toy with players’ emotions and put the audience in complex situations.
