Mythwrecked: Ambrosia Island Game Director on Game Delay, Accessibility, and Following Up a BAFTA-Nominated Game

Mythwrecked: Ambrosia Island is an exploration-based adventure game where you play as Alex, a rookie backpacker who is shipwrecked on a beautiful long-forgotten island of myth and sunshine. We got the chance to interview Alex Kanaris-Sotiriou, Director and Lead Developer at Polygon Treehouse, on their upcoming game. Here is what they had to say.

Your first game, Röki, was very well received. How does making a BAFTA-nominated debut impact/influence your second game?

Kanaris-Sotiriou: Röki was our first indie game and although we’d worked at PlayStation for many years previously, it was the first time we’d been in full control of all aspects of a project, everything from its design, story to UI, so it was pretty scary. The fact the end result was so well received gives us some validation and a bit more confidence in our creative decisions for our second indie game. With Mythwrecked we further explore non-violent gameplay, interactive storytelling, and the clean graphical art styles that we established with our Röki, but taken to the next level. It’s been awesome to have that foundation and to take everything we learnt on our debut onto Mythwrecked.

We know that you play as Alex as she solves the mystery of Ambrosia Island, saves the Gods, and finds a way home, but what is the main gameplay loop of Mythwrecked?

Kanaris-Sotiriou: With Mythwrecked ‘friendship’ is at the core of the game. We really liked centering a game about meeting new people, earning their trust, and becoming close buddies!

You can become friends with each god in two ways; firstly, by doing favours for them around the island, and secondly, by helping them recover their memories. The favours range from feeding hungry seagulls to guiding wayward ghosts back to the underworld!

To help them recover their identities the player searches for lost memento items that are hidden around the island. If you can find the right item, it might just be the thing to jog a god’s memory and help them remember who they are!

You do have a helping hand in this treasure hunt though, you’re assisted by your Ambrosidex device’s radar. As you explore the island you’ll pick up weak signal beeps and be able to follow them to their source to uncover a lost item. As you get closer, the beeps will increase in strength and frequency, and the reverse if you move away from the treasure, like using a metal detector. We think it’s a really cool interactive way to hunt for treasure using 3D exploration!

Once you’ve found a lost keepsake, you then have to work out which god it belongs to. If you deliver it to the right owner you’ll trigger a flashback where a god will remember a key moment from their past and uncover more of the mystery of the island.

We call this approach the ‘Story Sandbox’ and we really like intertwining exploration and storytelling in this way.

Becoming close friends with the Gods has a number of benefits! It opens up new locations around the island for you to visit, as you can now visit the gods in their homes, you can talk to them about guarded topics that they’d refused to discuss when you were strangers and they’ll also let you trade the Ambrosia fruit you collect on your adventures with them for all kinds of off and strange items that might come in handy on your adventure.

What are some of your inspirations for Mythwrecked?

Kanaris-Sotiriou: Gameplay-wise I’m not sure there are any direct inspirations but we definitely enjoy games that intertwine narrative and exploration in interesting ways. One of our key goals is that these aspects of our games should not be separate but interwoven, so that exploring the game world also is exploring the game’s story. Some games we’ve enjoyed to this end are Paradise Killer, A Space for the Unbound, Eastward, and Firewatch.

Visually we’re springboarding off the clean graphical Polygon Treehouse art style we established with Röki for our new game. It’s an art style that focuses on shape, silhouette, and pure colour choice to give a unique look. We work in 3D but it’s definitely inspired by flat-shaded 2D games like Another World and Flashback. We really like working in this way, it allows us to create epic adventures with just a tiny team where the only limit is our imagination.

One other visual (and tonal) inspiration are what I call ‘modern Saturday morning cartoons’. Shows like Stephen Universe have such a minimal yet striking art style and the themes of friendship and family are certainly shared by Mythwrecked. I think it’s great that a show can tell a deeply impactful emotional story, but importantly, still be fun and entertaining, which is also central to our storytelling efforts in our game.

You recently released an accessibility trailer, why was that important for your team?

Kanaris-Sotiriou: One of our mottos is ‘Adventure for All’. For us, this means making sure as many people as possible can enjoy our games. Some of this comes down to the ‘approachable design’ of the game; so no death, in-game (UI, journals, guides) and in-fiction (story, characters) help systems, having a player journal to track your progress, and much more.

Accessibility features are the other key element of achieving this goal. We have a wide range of them in Mythwrecked, from button remapping, non-dialogue captions, toggling rumble and sprint inputs to name but a few. Obviously, we’re a small team, but we want to do everything we can to embrace people’s differences and welcome them to Ambrosia Island.

What helped inform the decision to move the release window for the game?

Kanaris-Sotiriou: The clear focus for us is making the game awesome and we don’t tend to worry too much about external factors or what other folks are up to.

We put a lot of ourselves into our games, and Mythwrecked is one that’s very close to our hearts. We’ve had some amazing feedback from events and we want to make sure the game fully lives up to that potential, and we put the best possible version of the game into the hands of players.

People are always surprised how tiny the team at Polygon Treehouse is, and by moving the release to next year we can make sure that we put the best possible version of the game into the hands of players, and also enjoy the journey ourselves. Our publisher has been super supportive of the decision which is amazing and we’re looking forward to showing more of the game in the coming months.

And that brings us to the end of the interview. We want to thank Polygon Treehouse and Whitetorn Games for the opportunity and, of course, Alex Kanaris-Sotiriou for taking the time to answer our questions. Mythwrecked: Ambrosia Island is slated to release in 2024 for consoles and PC. You can watch the announcement trailer above and click here to wishlist the game now.