LOCK AND LOAD

Humanity might have defied the gods when it first brought fire down from the mountain, but it only truly troubled their omnipotence once it trapped that flame in a barrel – igniting gunpowder to propel itself into a new age of power, volatility and self-determination.
It’s at this precipice that mankind finds itself in Flintlock, the second project from New Zealand’s A44 Games. Founded by talent from Weta Digital, and having made its debut in 2018 with gorgeous action RPG Ashen, the studio is now a part of the global studio collective Kepler Interactive. Flintlock represents a major step up in ambition for A44, made possible thanks to the help of that backing. It has the Soulslike elements of the studio’s previous title, plus a setting expanded beyond dungeons and plains to a full open world.
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This isn’t the only leap forward A44 is making with this game. Where for Ashen it stuck with a swords-andsorcery setting, it’s placing Flintlock within a burgeoning fantasy subgenre with which it shares a name. Magic is still in play but faces competition as technology progresses to the cusp of the industrial revolution. And the gods of Flintlock’s world? They aren’t best pleased about it. “Humans had found themselves in a place where they felt like they had a seat at the table,” explains Derek Bradley, A44 CEO and Flintlock’s game director. “And then the gods turned up and just absolutely disregarded them. They would enthrall a human instead of speak to them – mind-control them and treat them like puppets.”
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In an attempt to shore up their authority, the gods threw open the door to the afterlife, not much caring how the influx of undead might impact human society. “The gods don’t need society,” Bradley says. “They just exert this magical power around them. They don’t mind pushing humanity back into the dark ages, just as it was on the precipice of technological advancement.”
“IT’S QUITE EXCITING TO IMAGINE CHALLENGING A LORD OF THE RINGS-STYLE MONSTER WITH A CANNON”
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FOX TALES
Nor’s fox-like companion, Enki, shares his name with the Sumerian god of creation, intelligence, crafts, water, magic, mischief, fertility and (it says here) semen. But his makeup in Flintlock comes from a mixture of ancient sources. “We’d researched the Mesopotamian afterlife for a while,” Bradley explains. “The creatures that inhabited it and gods of the time and all of those kinds of things. We looked at a lot of those stone reliefs and statues you get if you go to the Louvre and check out their Mesopotamian collection. Imagining if those creatures were real was the beginning point for Enki.”
Flintlock opens 50 years later, as a coalition human army approaches the gates of Dawn, the city stronghold of the old gods. The closer they get, the louder the whispers of the divine on the wind become. Newly secular but still superstitious, the soldiers put black powder in their coffee to ward off celestial influence. “This really gritty, unstable, probably unhealthy stuff,” Bradley says. “Something that they’re subject to, but also experimenting with.”
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Our protagonist, Nor, is a sapper – an explosives expert right at the front line of not just this sacrilegious war but also the dangerous and unpredictable technology that has enabled it. In her arsenal are hand cannons, mortars, shotguns, flintlock pistols and rifles. But while these weapons represent the state of the art in Flintlock, the one that ties it all together is the boarding axe – a sapper’s tool Nor uses to pry the armour from bosses before taking them down in Soulslike fashion. In the real-life age of sail, boarding axes were used to cut through nets and lines, clear fallen rigging, smash through the doors of cabins and ultimately to kill. There’s an all-purpose practicality there that suits Nor, while the sheer specificity of the weapon speaks to Flintlock’s air of historical reenactment, even given the fantastical context in which it is being used.
“As you’re battling through these Napoleonic trenches, you’re fighting against the dead who have come back to life,” Bradley says. “They’re spewing forth from this door, and you’re trying to restore the balance again – so that people can just die and be laid to rest and not have these tyrannical old gods presiding over them.” Your mission, as Nor: knock down the walls of Dawn and, once inside, blast that door to the afterlife shut once again.
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It’s a desperate, transgressive act, and nobody’s quite sure what the implications will be. But, as it happens, they won’t be finding out just yet. “When you do get there, you present enough of a threat that one of the gods jumps down and fights you,” Bradley says. “And in doing so, the leader of your little platoon, who is also your father, gets killed.”
In the aftermath, your team is scattered to the winds – those same winds the gods use to talk inside your head. With humanity’s great hope crushed, Nor deserts. “Which is when your real journey begins, in that you hear a rumour about a weapon that could possibly kill a god,” Bradley says, “which are unkillable. And so you go on this mission to find this weapon.”
This is no open-world MacGuffin hunt – as compelling a lure as Ciri and Yennefer are, we’ve had enough of those. Rather, this weapon quickly becomes Flintlock’s deuteragonist, effectively a living limb who moves in lockstep with Nor in combat and exploration. He takes the form of a fox, to be reductive about it. A fox with oversized ears and horns; with monkey claws at the front, bird claws at the back, raven feathers all over, and a phoenix-style tail. He looks at once like royalty and also trouble. He’s a loose take on an ancient Mesopotamian trickster myth, and his name is Enki.
“You almost can’t talk about Nor without talking about Enki,” Bradley says. “They’re such an interesting duo. Nor is the stoic army brat, because she’s literally grown up in the trenches. She’s this virtuoso gunslinger, very competent, very matter-of-fact, very driven. She can feel the pain and push through it. Enki, on the other hand, is this selfish, lovable, greedy, loyal little trickster. When you’re in, you’re in – but until you’re in, you can’t really trust him.”
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Bradley smiles to himself when talking about Enki, as if recalling the antics of a wilful but treasured pet. Yet as much as this kawaii creature is a companion character, he’s also the chosen one in his own story – and certainly in his own head. Enki’s innate power has given him an acute sense of his own specialness, and a kind of entitlement. Whereas Nor has earned everything she has through sheer will and engineering nous, Enki is used to circumventing effort and consequence with magic. He’s something of an emotional escapologist. It’s a difference in background and outlook that defines the pair’s dynamic, a marriage of equals and opposites that is central to Flintlock’s story.
In fact, you can extrapolate from that juxtaposition to explain the unique appeal of flintlock fantasy as a whole. “In steampunk, the technology becomes fantastical in itself,” Bradley says. “Whereas flintlock fantasy is almost like historical reenactment mixed with fantasy. It’s very gritty, it’s boots-in-the-mud, dirt-under-your-fingernails type stuff. It’s quite exciting to imagine challenging a Lord Of The Rings-style monster with a cannon.”
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There’s something about bringing the godly and whimsical into close proximity with gunpowder that changes the lens on these old fantasy archetypes, forcibly pulling them into something like reality. In the process, you start to see the blemishes, the human-like imperfections. In Enki, that presents as a kind of “oily decadence”. “Enki’s faults are the most important parts about him,” Bradley explains. “He’s not better than everybody else, but he thinks he is. You expose his soft underbelly and realise who he is.”
Enki doesn’t only act as Nor’s foil – teasing out the fact that she doesn’t like grapes by guzzling the juicy treats everywhere they go – he’s also a fully fledged traversal system for Flintlock’s open world, dragging you through the air by magical means.
“Essentially it feels like a rollercoaster ride,” Bradley says. Flintlock’s world of wide deserts, echoing ruins and looming cities is filled with thousands of lofty portals, discovered through exploration – and via Enki you can zip between these nodes at will, firing through the air from one to the next. This magic isn’t clean and simple, however: like everything in Flintlock, it’s subject to earthy, grounded properties such as gravity. Nodes don’t plant you gently on terra firma upon exit, but simply “throw you out the other end” – leaving you to redirect Nor in midair by throwing out explosives, relying on them to break huge falls. “It ends up being a bit Spider-Man-like, I would say, in terms of how you dart between things,” Bradley says. “But also a puzzle, because we’ve got really predefined points, although there are a lot of them. As you open them up, they create larger motorways through the world, if you will, where you can fly around.”
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The destinations that Enki magically hauls you between are varied but thematically linked, intended to portray a war from every angle – “stuff that’s right in the trenches, and stuff that’s so far away they almost don’t believe the war is happening.” Your impetus to travel is Nor’s need to put the band back together – to locate her former squad of sappers and rally them around Enki, their new godkilling weapon. You’ll find the scattered soldiers sequestered in dark places, where the undead have taken over, or else in bastions of knowledge, researching scientific secrets. You’ll even find some in locales where humans still worship the gods you’ve set out to destroy. Flintlock’s open world will be a reflection of the uneasy, frightening and conflicted place humanity finds itself in regard to its own future and afterlife.
“Within the factions of humanity, there are bandits and vagabonds, undead and humans who have joined together and opted out,” Bradley says. “You’ve got these pious knights who are very focused on justice and upholding the virtues of that side of the gods. You’ve got crazy death-cult knights out there as well, obsessed by the door of the afterlife having opened. Tons of perspectives on humanity throughout the whole thing.”
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Wherever a character particularly intrigues you as a player, you’ll often have the option to drill down in that spot, mining further story. It’s an approach inherited from A44’s previous project, Ashen, in which you would find townsfolk out in the world. “Once you’d done one quest for them, which was the main path quest, they would have a bunch of sidequests you could do for them as well,” Bradley says. “And you would learn about their characters.”
This kind of developer-authored but player-chosen storytelling is a unique benefit of the videogame medium, and something we’re told A44 has doubled down on in Flintlock. “As soon as players have to opt in for the side stories, you can get a great degree of emotional depth,” Bradley says. “Simply the fact that somebody chooses to help the character out when they didn’t have to is quite psychologically powerful. They’re a willing participant in that part of the story.”
While Flintlock will offer a typical open world in many respects – stuffed with objectives, quests, minigames and factions – it also challenges some of the uncomfortable fundamentals of its genre. Specifically the Far Cry-style territory grab that, as critics have pointed out in recent years, carries the stink of colonialism in the way it presents players with a new and undiscovered land to conquer. Flintlock’s themes, by contrast, are consciously pushing in the opposite direction.
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“Those gods are almost a symbol of colonialism,” Audrea Topps Harjo, A44’s COO, says. “They are people who have taken over your agency. What do you do when you wrestle with that structure, to find and gain your own identity? It’s still a game, it’s still gods and guns, but when you look at it from that lens, there’s another layer on top of that, from Nor being a woman of colour. It makes the character and the dynamic even more an echo of a reality.”
Building an effective anti-colonial open world is as much about the mechanics you don’t implement as the ones you do, it turns out. An early version of Flintlock’s traversal system saw Nor travelling between different bodies, until Topps Harjo highlighted the problem. “It says something, right, using a body,” she points out. “Would you want your character to say that? I just bring the logic.”
Topps Harjo brings more than that to A44. A Student Academy Awardnominated filmmaker in her youth, she has spent almost 30 years in the entertainment industry, working at Sony Pictures Imageworks through the late ’90s on movies such as Contact, Starship Troopers and Godzilla. At EA she was a project manager on Medal Of Honor, helping the company adapt to a new world of outsourced and distributed development, before directing huge swathes of the publisher’s output for mobile devices.
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A decade ago, she moved to New Zealand to work as a manager in the Weta Digital creature department behind, among other things, those magical monkey faces in Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes, for which her team was nominated for an Oscar. While there, she hired Bradley. “I’ve had a Forrest Gump life,” she says.
For Flintlock, it was Topps Harjo who brought on Kim Belair – the Montrealbased narrative director who has advocated for better representation in stories as a means of bringing new and exciting ideas to games. “She took the wonderful base layer Derek had, the world, and just elevated it,” Topps Harjo says. “You know the difference when there’s a person who’s reflecting at you and it’s true. There’s a certain truth that resonates that can’t be faked. I know some people won’t notice, but the people who are attuned to that, they’ll get it immediately.”
Topps Harjo feels connected to Nor as a protagonist. “Being a Black woman in the world, things never really came easy for me,” she says. “Even in a space where there’s only two per cent ...