Two weeks ago, we reported that developer American McGee is planning a series of episodic games that’ll revolve around tales of the Brothers Grimm.
Games Radar revealed more details about American McGee’s new game. He is planning 24 episodes and each individual episode will focus on a single fairy tale from the Brothers Grimm. The first episode is planned for spring 2008 through broadband gaming service GameTap.
Each episode will feature a series of mini-games that’ll bring the player back to the fairy tales’ main themes which were oftentimes dark and foreboding. Planned mini-games will revolve around the gameplay mechanics of flying, driving, sneaking or herding.
Mission goals will be macabre but also filled with dark humor — McGee gave an example of one of the mission goals: "Make the wife a widow."
In addition, McGee and company seems to have invented a new fighting mechanic called "Words as Weapons". It looks like you’ll be literally throwing words like "burn", "fly" or "expand" at enemies to inflict them with the associated word damage.
Eddie Inzuato, our staff writer at GamerNode commented, "Now that second part sounds very cool. As someone who enjoys using the English language, the idea of defeating enemies with words is very inviting.
I have to wonder, though, what does "pluck words from the world" actually mean? Will there be a sea of words floating around the sky, which can be grabbed when needed? Or will the player have an arsenal of words at the ready? The way I imagine it would be similar to the figments in Psychonauts – the lingering words creating an atmosphere around the game’s action."
From episode to episode, these words will change to suit whatever tale you’ll be going through. McGee also hints that due to the simple control scheme, Grimm may be heading to consoles in the future.
McGee also elaborated on what happened to his planned American McGee’s Oz. Struggling publisher Infogrames/Atari was initially funding the project but it was canned when they bottomed out of money to support game development.
A planned film version is currently green-lighted for Oz but as McGee put it, "Hollywood is often frustratingly slow. I figure these projects will happen when they happen. These days I’m happy to focus my energies on Grimm."
(with additional reporting by Eddie Inzauto)
