Summary

• The Mabinogion has been overlooked in the fantasy genre, offering a rich tapestry of magical elements and storytelling tropes.
• Welsh culture struggles against English dominance, with Tales from the Mabinogion serving as a tribute to forgotten heritage and language preservation.
• Tales from the Mabinogion is a unique walking sim based on this forgotten legend.

Most fantasy fans will never have heard of the Mabinogion. I pride myself on my wide reading of the genre and I’d never heard its name uttered before a painterly indie game borrowed its stories and landed in my inbox. Judging by what 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tales from the Mabinogion developer Stevan Anastasoff tells me, it sounds a bit like Wales’ answer to Ireland’s💛 Táin Bó Cúailnge or Nordic epic Beowulf. So why has nobody ever heard of it?

“It has everything,” Anastasoff excitedly tells me over a video call. “There's wizards and dragons and giants and magic swords, magic rings, rings of invisibility, cloaks of invisibility, battles against armies of zombies – every fantasy trope you can think of is there. I'm a hardcore fantasy nerd – I started my career as a writer for 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Games Workshop – and I'd never heard of this book.

“So I started asking the question, why have I never heard of the Mabinogion before? And the reason is complex, but the heart of it is the fact that it's a Welsh book.”

Welsh Blood, Welsh Sweat, Welsh Tears

Welsh culture, language, and identity h🐷as always struggled to stay afloat thanks to the domination of Wales’ larger neighbour, England. As w🧔ell as suppression of local culture by English invaders, learning English has traditionally afforded more opportunities for Welsh people. Even in the past century, the Welsh Not has punished schoolchildren for speaking Welsh in their own country.

Anastasoff is acutely aware of the degradation of this culture, because at around the same time he began reading the Mabinogion, his daughter embarked on a school project which involved researching her family tree. Anastasoff lent a helping hand and quickly found newspaper clippings in Welsh, Welsh writing scrawled across the back of 19th century photographs. His mother may have been called Bronwynꦚ and grandmother was Gwen Jones – a name so Welsh it feels like a stereotype – but they only ever identified to him as British.

The former Ubisoft and developer threw himself into the Mabinogion. It called to both his hardcore nerd and his forgotten heritage, and he decided to make a game about it. The result, Tales from the Mabinogion, was revealed last week with a beautiful trailer that Anastasoff ensured had “historical authenticity” (not to be confused with historical accuracy), something he learned while working on the streets of London in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Assassin’s Creed Syndicate. “When you're wandering around the forests and mountains and coastlines and castles of ancient Wales,” he says, “[it should] feel like what it would feel like to be a part of the Mabinogion.”

Anastasoff is now learnin🐼g Welsh, and the entire game is narrated in the Welsh lang𒆙uage, with English subtitles.

As masterful as every brushstroke was, the game was shrouded in mystery, in part thanks to the fog creeping from the꧑ margins of the screen and also because so few had read the source material or could work out how the game would actually play.

Tales From The Mabinogion Is A Breath Of The Wild Walking Sim With A Wonderfully Welsh Twist

Thankfully, Anastasoff was more than hap🌊py to𒊎 offer explanation.

“I really hate the term, but it’s what people would describe as a walking sim,” he says. “It's not a pure walking sim, though, there are other gameplay loops in there as well [...] I wanted to do something more, have some kind of clear gameplay there as well, so it's not just wandering around listening to narrative.”

You wander from story point to story ♒point, and at each unlock a new chapter of the cinematic story. Anastasoff describes the world as similar to that of Breath of the Wild (albeit far smaller in scope), in which you can take any route, but the environment subtly shepherds you towards the next narrative beat. But Tales from the Mabinogion also takes inspiration from Soulslikes and battle royales, making for an unusual combination.

“In the book, there’s this magical fog that descends on the kingdom and basically destroys everything, lays everything to waste,” Anastasoff explains. “So, we're in this magical post-apocalyptic scenario. And the fog is still there throughout the game, and it works kind of like a ring of death from a battle royale type game.”

Sometimes the fog will slowly creep towards you, ushering you gently in the right direction. At others it will descend with fervorous haste, forcing you to run, run. There’s alsღo a Witcher-type tracking mode to lead you to new destinations and combat, which Anastasoff describes as “superficially Soulslike”.

It’s Soulslike in the sense that it’s animation-driven collider-based fights, but Tales from the Mabinogion won’t be difficult or punishing. In fact, Anastasoff wants to avoid frustrating the player in any way. As such, there’s no health system, no player death, no fail states at all. But when the source material has fights, your game needs fights, too. He assures me “it's not a game about fighting things”, though.

Then you have the artistic direction. This is what drew me into the trailer, before any rumbli🍌ngs of fantasy mythology sunk their claws in. Anastasoff knew that he couldn’t replicate the photorealism of his previous triple-A experience with his small team of freelancers, but hܫe wasn’t sure he wanted to.

“When you're dealing with myths and legends, you don't necessarily want a realistic style,” he explains. “These are not realistic stories. So I think sometimes trying to give them a realistic treatment doesn't really do the narrative service.”

How It Feels Going Indie In 2024

Going solo is always a big risk, especially in 2024. The 💯games industry has never felt more precarious, so why did Anastasoff choose to make a break for it now?

“The feeling at the time that I quit was that it was riskier to stay where I was,” he explains. “There's like so much disruption in the triple-A industry.” When one of the reasons you work for a triple-A developer is security, and that security is suddenly eroded, what benefits are there to staying put? “[It] was feeling less and less safe,” Anastasoff recalls. “At the same time, the atmosphere was becoming – across the industry – more and more unhappy. So it felt like more of a risk to stay doing what I was doing than to quit and do something else.”

Anastasoff is open about his🔯 privilege; decades of experience, a health🔥y savings balance, and a wife who’s always been the principal earner in the family all helped make his decision easier. But it’s not all freedom and happiness when you go solo.

“The big thing that weighs on me at the moment is just loneliness,” he says “It's such a huge change from going to work with teams of hundreds of people around you to just being by yourself.”

He makes Zoom calls to freelancers on the project, freelancers like Black Library writer Gav Thorpe, who Anastasoff knows from his time working on White Dwar💧f, but it’s not the same as a bustling studio. Still, Anastasoff is fiercely independent – shunning even the idea of finding a publisher for Tales from the Mabinogion – and happier making his scaled-down fantasy game than li🐻ving a Groundhog Day repeating the same mistakes over and over again in triple-A teams.

Tales from the Mabinog🦩ion feels like it was fated to be borne into existence. From Anastasoff’s hardcore nerdery and recently-uncovered Welsh heritage, to the instability of the triple-A scene, it’s like a path to the Annwn has opened up in front of him, the fickle fates beckoning him towards his destiny.

Fated or not, indie games don’t appear magically out of thin air and Anastasoff has a lot of work ahead of him if he wants to meet his planned release date of spring☂ 2025. But with the spirits of his Wꦉelsh ancestors lighting a fire in his belly, he’s primed to bring Welsh fantasy, and a core part of his heritage, to the wider world.