To what world belong Fizzgigs and Podlings? To answer that, we’ll have to travel far into the past: the ‘80s. While the Jim Henson Company was, at the time, known for producing more overtly kid-friendly work like The Muppet Show and segments on Sesame Street, they also directed their interest towards films with more mature and darkly fantastical themes.
One of these productions was The Dark Crystal. If you grew up in the ‘80s, the name might resonate with you. It’s a film set in the fictional world of Thra, in which two races — the malevolent Skeksis and the wizardly Mystics — are struggling over control over a magical Crystal. And yes: all the characters are puppets.
The show garnered such a cult following that now, nearly three decades since its original release, the Jim Henson Company has teamed up with Netflix to release an entire prequel miniseries called The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, set 100 years ahead of the events of the movie. When studio BonusXP was approached to help develop a game based on the new series, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics, they were posed with an interesting challenge: Adapting a unique, beloved visual aesthetic for a game isn’t as easy as you would think.
Luckily, BonusXP jumped at the challenge. The team had all grown up with The Dark Crystal, so accepting the project was a no-brainer for them.
“Our senior concept artist is, in a company replete with fans of The Dark Crystal, hands down the biggest fan of The Dark Crystal,” BonusXP CEO David Pottinger said. “Artists are notoriously difficult to get excited about somebody else's ideas, but when he heard that we were going to pitch a Dark Crystal game, he was like, ‘We have to do this, and it has to be a tactics game.’"
In the spirit of staying retro, the game is heavily inspired by old-school turn-based tactical combat games. As players make their way across Thra’s world map, they’ll discover territories owned by different clans, each of which will contain their own clan-specific missions. The game also allows players to make significant story choices that alter the outcome of the narrative and availability of other missions.
Players can choose from three playable races — Gelflings, Podlings, and the adorable dog-puff Fizzgigs — when building their teams. Characters are gradually unlocked as the player progresses through the main campaign, and as they level up, they raise their stats and learn new abilities. Players can assign characters primary and secondary “jobs,” which function as character classes and determine their ability loadouts.
If you’re a fan of tactical games, all of this will probably sound familiar to you — and that’s the point. “We wanted to make something that is very true to the core ideas of the genre,” Pottinger said. As a whole, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics embraces nostalgia.
A major challenge, however, with handling a franchise that has such a unique style and such a storied lore is doing it justice in the eyes of its fans. BonusXP was well aware of this when they accepted the project, and the studio went to great lengths to ensure that their portrayal of Thra and its fantastical denizens was as true to the film as can be.
“One of the great things about a property that's been around as long as The Dark Crystal has is that there's a boatload of source material,” Pottinger explained. To accurately represent a world that’s as meticulously designed and memorable as Thra, BonusXP consulted the Jim Henson Company for the movie’s original designs, including access to the original puppets that had made the movie so magical.
“We had kind of a ‘dream-come-true’ chance to go out to the Henson Company and go through the Creature Workshop, where they've got all these materials for The Dark Crystal,” Pottinger said. “Our artists were kids in a candy store. We walked in and they had a rack with all the Gelfling heads that they had molded — and there's a lot of them. They let us pull them off the rack, and we took pictures of them for reference.”
Still, adapting The Dark Crystal’s characters for a video game was no easy task. For one, the top-down, isometric perspective renders characters tiny from the point of view of the player. As a result, the lovable little Fizzgigs would seem like specks on the screen.
“So when we put a Gelfling and a Fizzgig on screen we have to cheat the size of the Fizzgig,” Pottinger said. “Of course, the Henson folks were very, very fastidious in pointing out that our Fizzgigs were too big.” But after explaining their reasoning, BonusXP worked with the Jim Henson Company to get them down to an appropriate size.
These small details demonstrate the amount of love and attention with which BonusXP is handling the adaptation. At every step of the way, they’ve worked with Netflix and the Jim Henson Company to ensure that The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics is as faithful as it can be to the original, preserving the sense of wonder and whimsy that first captivated audiences in the ‘80s.
Though Pottinger maintained that he had to stay tight-lipped about the details of the game’s plot ahead of the release of the show itself, he did mention that the game’s campaign will extend beyond the events of the series. While many of the missions will concern content from the Netflix show, some will explore the outer reaches of The Dark Crystal’s lore. Whether you’re new to The Dark Crystal or have been a longtime fan, BonusXP makes Thra seem as wondrous and inviting as it’s ever been.