The year 2013 was a busy time for gaming. Long-delayed masterpieces across the spectrum of budget and scope continually manifested and rippled the waters; Fez, The Last of Us, Bioshock Infinite, and the official appearance of Spelunky’s complete rewrite of roguelikes. It’s also when Spanish indie development studio Deconstructeam began brewing its refreshingly personal, mature, and idiosyncratic narrative work, entering Gods Will Be Watching into the 26th Ludum Dare game jam. This kicked off a glowing span of games which now garners a retrospective in Essays on Empathy, a compilation published by Devolver Digital which collects much of their incomparable smaller-scale output.
With their last full-length release – the gorgeous and provocative cyberpunk noir adventure The Red Strings Club – approaching its three-year anniversary, Essays on Empathy looks back at Deconstructeam’s evolution and diversion over nine productive years. The collection's newest pack-in De Tres al Cuarto could prove the main pull for longtime fans.
Screen Rant got the chance to chat with Jordi de Paco and Marina González, 2/3rds of Deconstructeam's trio; rounding out third would be Paula Ruiz a/k/a Fingerspit, whose magnificent soundtrack compositions are inextricable from the success of these titles. Jordi and Marina were forthcoming in discussing the highs and lows of an ambitious indie studio, a team who sees in their games a confluence of personal expression, trauma, humor, and socio-political statement.
I’ve been following your work in games for a while. I’m incredibly impressed and inspired and moved by the stuff that you all do, and this release was a surprise. For this compilation, did you do the dangerous director’s cut thing, where you’re diving into these old games like, “Let’s fix all this stuff that we never got to fix?” Or was it like, “This is our work, warts and all?”
Jordi de Paco: Inside the game, there is a disclaimer saying that these are “underground pieces of software.”
Marina González: We didn’t touch anything in the old games that we had, because it was so much. If we started working on them again, [it would have been] too much. They are what they are.
Jordi de Paco: Yeah. It’s like a review of what we did and what we learned along the way.
I noticed that Interview with the Whisperer is not on there.
Jordi de Paco: Yeah. Interview with the Whisperer is not there because it utilizes a chatbot server, we need to pay like, $20 a month to keep this old man alive. Since, eventually, we’re not gonna want to pay the maintenance of this old man forever, we’re not including it here.
Ah, because it would break it, would break later on, and you’d be like, “Wait, we’ve committed to this for life.”
Jordi de Paco: Eventually we can open a Patreon for this old guy. “If you don’t want him to die, just pay him per month.”
That’s fantastic.
Jordi de Paco: [Interview with the Whisperer] is a sort of therapy game for us, because, the truth is, we’ve been working for about two years on something bigger than The Red Strings Club. And we had this great idea during the pandemic, since we are all trapped here and we can’t go outside, we are confined, let’s work harder than usual. Then, whenever this is over, we can go out and play. It happened to be a very bad idea, and around August of last year we broke down. I mean, like, pretty badly. Anxiety attacks, being unable to get on the computer. It was really, really tough. We had a talk with Devolver, saying that we were unable to keep on working. And they told us that it was fine, that mental health was the most important thing, and we could stop working for any time that we needed without repercussions for the project. We would make it work in any way. And, what we’ve been doing for the last part of 2020 is going to therapy, the three of us, because we were pretty much fed up and done with video games.
Marina González: Yeah. I mean, we did burn out a bit, you know, because we work a lot, but not this kind of burnout. You can’t be in front of the computer because it’s too much. It triggers something in you like, “I don’t want to be here.” We started working on Interview with the Whisperer around November, December, maybe, and that was some kind of therapy to process, but it was slower, you know? Like, we were outside designing the game. We went outside of the house to design the game, because inside the house it was too much.
Jordi de Paco: Avoiding the computer.
Marina González: Another environment, another kind of scene to design this thing. So we made that and it was nice. We started this year thinking, okay, we need to keep working on the big project, but it was really scary to be working on that, because it was too much. So they working with the idea of making this compilation of games, because it was like, “Hey, we saw that you have all these really great smaller games that you have been making these years, and it would be nice to make a package with all of them and release it, and make some extra things, with the idea for this collection. Make a documentary, make a new game. And it has been really great.”
Jordi de Paco: If this is a genre of game, I call it a “therapy game.” We’ve made a one-hour long documentary, and we talk about all the games we’ve done and our design philosophy and stuff. And we look back at everything we’ve done so far, reflecting on how we got here. And also we did this exclusive piece, which is called De Tres Al Quarto, which is about a couple of comedians in Mallorca. They are like, really, really bad comedians. This one is not that small, it’s about one hour and a half. It comes exclusively with the collection, it’s like, medium-sized, if there is something such as a medium-sized thing.
And the thing is that, it goes [over] the topics we’ve been struggling with. Like dealing with the trauma of a not-so-successful creative life, and how you relate with success and failure, and how do you work around people that you love, and all that stuff, is represented with a metaphor of two guys making comedy. But it’s actually about any kind of creative life, this cycle of creativity and putting yourself through this ringer of making stuff.
It’s interesting that Interview with the Whisperer is coming out of this sense of feeling trapped. So, to escape that, you go outside. And then you make this game about being stuck in a room!
While playing it, I was remembering when chatbots first appeared and losing my entire mind on them. Spending hours talking to a robot. Was this a hearkening back to that? Did you have a similar first brush with chatbots back when they first emerged?
Jordi de Paco: Yeah. I mean – in Spain, I think [this is] something that only was released in Spain – there was this chatbot that was a psychiatrist, that you talked to it and it psychoanalyzed you, but it was just a chatbot. I think in the early 2000s or maybe late ‘90s.
That seems dangerous.
Jordi de Paco: Yeah, it was like, this piece of software, and you would load it from a weird place and it became popular among kids in Spain. It was pretty basic, but it said things like, “Oh, you told me you like pizza, tell me more about pizza.” And we were all like, “Whoa, it knows!” So I loved it. And whenever I find a chatbot on a webpage, I always mess with it.
Years ago, I spoke with one of the developers of Gris, and I was asking them a lot about Spain’s indie game scene. And, at the time, they were like, “It’s not super-developed. There’s a few of us and all of us know each other.” And now it’s years later, and I look at Deconstructeam as critically important, early representatives of the scene. Is there anything you could tell me about the Spanish indie scene? Is it thriving right now? Is it wrecked by the pandemic, is the pandemic making it even better?
Marina González: Hmm. I think it’s thriving, because there’s the Gris guys, and there’s, for example, The Game Kitchen, they made Blasphemous. It’s been a huge hit, at least here in Spain. It’s one of, I think it’s the most…
Jordi de Paco: I think it has been the best indie release in Spain.
Marina González: And there are others.
Jordi de Paco: I think it’s about to get even better, because you have Super Mega Team doing The Knight Witch right now, and you have Brainwash Gang, they did the Brainwash Propaganda, which was a direct [indie game showcase].
Marina González: And they’re going to be releasing a lot of projects.
Jordi de Paco: Yeah, I mean, if you want more insight into the Spanish development scene, I think it’s pretty big. There are about 500 studios right now in Spain. But the thing is that, even if there are a lot, there are not that many that are making a living out of it. So, I think it’s in a bubble, and it feels like there’s a lot of stuff happening, but I believe they still have to get to a point in which it settles, and some studios become like, solid.
Gris was a huge success. The Blasphemous guys are saying that they want to invest in smaller Spanish studios with what they earn. So maybe they are building some kind of net for Spanish indie developers. Because the truth is that Spanish game development is pretty cheap, compared to any in other countries, with the US or the UK. The cost of life here is way lower, the salaries are way lower. So, with less investment, if you can trick Devolver Digital into giving you money, it’s pretty cheap for them.
Yeah. When you guys said that Devolver gave you guys a break, for lack of a better expression, I’ve never felt like a single Devolver game has been rushed out the door. I feel like Devolver games come out when they’re done. I’ve never seen something where it’s like, oh, this was half-baked but they had to hit this quarter, so…
Jordi: We know that for a fact, because I don’t think we’ve ever met a single milestone since signing with Devolver. Milestones are something that you need to aim for, they’re not like hard deadlines, in which, when you fail, you are done.
What are the games that inspired you to start making games? I know that you had a career pivot early on.
Jordi de Paco: I think the games came in two waves to get me into game development. Because I remember being really young, six or seven, and the first time I thought I wanted to make video games, having that born in my brain, it was with LucasArts Adventures, with Monkey Island and Fate of Atlantis. And that was the first time I thought, “I want to make something like this. I want to play with digital dolls and make stories.” I drew in a notebook these stories and thought about making point-and-click adventures. But then, people tell you that wanting to be a game developer is like wanting to be an astronaut or a football player, something like that, so I started studying for something proper.
Next, I think it was as a teenager with Metal Gear Solid, the one for the PlayStation. What Hideo Kojima did to me, I remember it pretty well, it was the first game with which I cried. It was the final video in the snow, with the soundtrack, “The Best is Yet to Come,” and you see the foxes, and they tell you about nuclear waste and the menace of war. And I was at the age where I didn’t understand why, but I was crying. And I was like, games can do this, and I want to do something like this.
Why I started making games, like, actually doing them… That, I think it was, it was around the time of Hotline Miami and Super Meat Boy and stuff like that, in which, suddenly, I thought, “Wow, people are making games that aren’t like these ‘astronaut games’ they told me about.” I don’t have to be a quantum physicist to make games, people are making games that are this big. So, I want to do it.
So those are the three steps to start making games that finally put me on this path.
Yeah. Like, the door was opened all of a sudden. You’re like, “Oh, this I can do.”
Jordi de Paco: Exactly, exactly.
I also grew up with point-and-click adventures, and I still play them occasionally. But I feel like your work in the genre is never just about storytelling. The name of this new collection is Essays on Empathy, and I think empathy is incredibly important to pretty much any game you’ve ever made, but I also feel like they’re incredibly intimate. Something like The Red Strings Club completely immersed me. Is this intimacy something you strive for when creating, are you trying to prompt intimate reactions from the player?
Jordi de Paco: Yeah. This is something that we talk about in the documentary. The documentaries [on the games] are not about how to make games. They are actually about philosophy and politics and diversity and stuff. When we started making games, we were like, blindly making games, just trying to make fun platformers, etc. Maybe we did it a bit by instinct but weren’t thinking about anything political. But then we discovered as we made games, with Zen and the Art of Transhumanism and Supercontinent and later with 11:45 and Behind Every Great One, that it was amazing to put reality, a piece of you in there. And I think part of the appeal of The Red Strings Club is that it’s actually an exploration of how I felt in those times in which a lot of people close to me started taking antidepressants. And I was thinking about, is this altering their identities? Because I feel they behave the same, but is this the “true them,” the “happier them?” And a lot of the struggle I was going through, I put it in the Social Psych Welfare.
In every game we make now, we do that on purpose. Like, we have the theme of the game jam or we have an aesthetic we want to explore, but then we get altogether and talk about, what do we want to talk about in here? About toxic relationships, about body acceptance, about, I don’t know, you name it. We always try to represent a part of what we are preoccupied with right now.
Marina González: The most important thing in our games since, I think, Zen and the Art of Transhumanism, almost every game we’ve done has been really heavy narrative and heavy in these themes, the questions. The player has to put themselves into the game, in some way or another.
Jordi de Paco: We have this rule of thumb when we make these narratives: if we present a situation or a question that the player needs less than five seconds to go through, it’s not worth adding. The game needs to stop you in your tracks and start working on your head.
That happened to me a lot during The Red Strings Club, that’s for sure. That game has a lot of darkness to it, but also a lot of hope. I’m a huge fan of the Cyberpunk genre, and I think people take on a skewed view of it sometimes – even with Cyberpunk 2077 – how they’re like, it’s this oppressive world, all sexy and dark and dire. But it’s nothing without the hope. The magic of a cyberpunk story is that you’re in this overly populated world, where the masses are invisible and privately suffering, but then one person can truly affect change. In the case of The Red Strings Club, a guy at a desk on the phone is going to change this massive unknowable world.
The game has a deep hope buried in it. I want to say that hope is in a lot of your games. One of my favorites in the collection is Dear Substance of Kin, and I find it very affecting and sad, dark, and without a lot of hope. Is that the outlier?
Jordi de Paco: The theme [there] is hopeless. It’s because I draw a lot of inspiration from Spanish literature. A lot of it came after the civil war, and we’d been in a dictatorship until ’75. The readings you do at school are about people being hungry, poor, hurting each other. Dear Substance of Kin is inspired from that literature, with a bit of Dark Souls and such, through that lens. It’s fantasy, but it’s actually a representation of what was in my head as a kid. The biggest names of Spanish literature were born in a very poor and violent context.
But going back to hope: I believe there is hope in our games, purposely. For example, in The Red Strings Club, there is a point in which I constantly challenge this nihilism, which is the bridge scene, where you have to talk someone out of suicide or shooting you, there are two different ways that the scene can play out. The two results are different approaches to nihilism. The suicide is, anything is not worth it, and the one with the gun is, “I am angry at everything and I need to destroy the world,” and you have to talk someone out of that. And I was really challenging myself. Putting my most pessimistic self against my most hopeful self and making them clash in the scene. So, I believe there’s always hope, and even comedy in our games.
At the very end of The Red Strings Club you can joke about what’s going on. I believe comedy is an integral part of being human, dealing with life. I like to keep it in our narratives.
Well, it makes sense that your newest game centers on comedy, then!
Can you speak a little bit about game jams? I spoke with Jan Willem Nijman a while back, and we spoke about the Oulipo movement and about constraints breeding creativity. Game jams seem to be your lifeblood, and inextricable from what Deconstructeam is. Tell me a little bit about the game jams movement from your perspective. And, also, if you could comment on game jams during the pandemic, because I think that’s an interesting topic.
Marina González: So, I think game jams are a way to not overthink that much. To work without having the struggle to always have to rethink everything. When you make a bigger game, you have time to doubt yourself a lot. Change lots of things, redesign many times. I mean a game jam, you only have two or three days, so you don’t have much time to change things. You need to work a lot, think, “Okay, I’m going to do this, let’s hope it works, let’s do our best.” I think it’s a really great [way] to explore things creatively.
We usually spend like, half a day thinking about the idea. Sometimes it’s a day, a whole day thinking about it, designing everything. Sometimes it’s half a day thinking about what we want to do. Then it’s like, well, let’s work and see what happens. It’s the magic, you don’t know what is going to happen in that game jam.
Jordi de Paco: There are two really important points to me. One is that you get rid of the commercial pretension. You don’t think, “Is this gonna sell, is this gonna work?” So you can get truly experimental.
Marina González: Overthinking comes from thinking, “A lot of people are gonna play this.”
Jordi de Paco: “It’s going to be reviewed.”
Marina González: “You have to work on menus.” In a game jam you get rid of all of that. It’s only creativity.
Jordi de Paco: The second point is, a game jam is permission to fail. It can go wrong and it’s nothing bad. You only spent a weekend on it. It’s not like, “We spent six months on this project and it’s not working,” it’s like, go out there and fail! Just make it happen. If it’s not worth it, you won’t include it in a future collection and that’s it.
Would you speak about a failure? Is there a failure you learned from, that was interesting, that came about in a game jam you entered?
Marina González: Well, there was a game jam that was a really failed game jam.
Jorid: Are you thinking of Fear Syndicate?
Marina González: Catastrophe.
Jordi de Paco: You can play it right now, Fear Syndicate. It’s out there. We cried many times during making that, because I don’t know what happened. It was out of control. In the end, I broke [the whole] game jam. Like, let’s just mix the assets and program with the stuff, make a fantasia about violence. Then I wrote a nice postmortem on it being a reflection on senseless violence and stuff. But it was just covering up for a really failed game.
The idea of dispensing with the fear of game development via a game jam is interesting.
Jordi de Paco: There was a point where we entered game jams because there was this rumor that, if you win a Ludum Dare, you are going to get selected by a publisher and make it big, so the first times it was like, “We need to make this! We need to make gold!” With time, we realized that it’s not a guarantee of anything. You can take first place in a Ludum Dare, but if the game’s not good, it’s not good. The most important reward of a game jam is having made another game.
Marina González: In fact, with Behind Every Great One, which is another game in the collection, we started making that game in a Ludum Dare. We didn’t finish in time. It was the first time we didn’t finish a Ludum Dare. We went to finish it. It didn’t matter if we finished it in time, because we were gonna finish it because it’s what we want to do, is make games. Game jams are an excuse to make games. We [achieved] that kind of thinking after years of joining game jams. Before it was like, we need to finish this, you know? Because if not, we’re gonna fail.
Jordi de Paco: Socially imposed pressure is the worst.
I wanted to talk to you about that game, Behind Every Great One. I think many have discussed it before, and it’s possibly my favorite in your collection here. One of the reasons it’s my favorite and one of the reasons I find it traumatic to play is that, when I play it, I feel like I see myself in both of the characters. I feel like I’ve been the wife and I’ve been the husband. It makes me embarrassed and ashamed to have been either. Do you feel like most players identify with both characters?
Jordi de Paco: Yes.
Marina González: Some identify with both. Some identify with the husband, then change [their view]. “The wife is suffering a lot, so I didn’t think about this kind of stuff that maybe happened with my mother, or my girlfriend,” or whatever. They inhabit that character and see that this is a reality, [something] which happens.
Jordi de Paco: It was traumatic to make.
Marina González: To play it today, I think it’s one of my favorites, but it’s also really hard to play it nowadays. It awakens some memories.
Jordi de Paco: That game is like, it has too much reality in it. Many times we work with high fiction concepts.
Yeah. This one has no artifice, it’s just raw.
Jordi de Paco: Yeah. I put the stuff that I was doing, that I saw my parents doing, that I saw a lot of friends. I mean, that’s a dynamic in relationships that happens way too often, [for] which we are often to blame. I think it’s really powerful because, when we made it, I always keep it in mind. And it always comes back to mind when I start to try off the path, and I think, “S—t, I’m going full Gabriel.” So, I mean, we’ve had some friends play it and they cried. It starts conversations. It reminds me of my father, it reminds me of my last relationship. It’s tough.
Maybe it’s also so affecting because it might also be the most minimalist game you’ve made. Even in text, as it doesn’t have a ton of text. Which means that, when you come to it, you pour your entire self into it, because there’s plenty of space to fill. I feel like that’s the one that’s gonna surprise people in Essays on Empathy, if people haven’t played it before.
Jordi de Paco: One of the reasons of wanting to make this collection is that, even if most of these games are free on Itch.io, there’s not a lot of people who play them, because Itch.io is a niche thing, after all. I feel like putting them out there, commercially speaking, is going to make Behind Every Great One and many other games get to a wider audience, and I’m eager to see how it interacts with the world on a larger scale.
What games are you playing right now?
Marina González: We’re playing Nier: Replicant. It’s really nice. I like the environment, the music, everything.
Jordi de Paco: Before that we did something which is not advisable for any human. We got the platinum trophy for Persona 5 Royale, then got the platinum trophy of Persona 5 Dancing in the Starlight. Then we started Persona 5 Strikers, and we had to leave it, we had to drop it midway, because we were hurting ourselves.
Devolver may be listening to this. Like, “Wait, hold on a second, you guys are platinuming Persona games!?”
Do you think the pandemic has affected indie game development in particular, from your perspective?
Marina González: I think it affected it a lot, psychologically. In terms of economy, I think it’s been great. We’ve maybe been selling our games more than before, since people are home and want to play games. I think it’s tough, psychologically, though. I think a lot of teams that work together, they couldn’t work together anymore, separately. So they delayed some projects or canceled some.
Jordi de Paco: What we know is the feel we have of others who make games, from the context we have in Spain and outside of it. It’s like, right now, it’s been, I don’t want to say the word “good,” but it’s been beneficial for selling more games. But I think it will impact the economy. We’ll notice it in the years to come, because it’s delayed development and affected many developers, so I feel like the repercussions are yet to come, on what that will mean for the game development industry.
What literature has inspired you, and are there any games you’ve worked on where you’ve directly thought about a book or piece of writing as you were doing it?
Jordi de Paco: The Red Strings Club has two, maybe three direct references I would cite. One is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which is why Zen and the Art of Transhumanism is named that way. Raymond Chandler, I used that feel, that vibe for the game. Then, Spanish literature, a book by Eduardo Punset, who is a Spanish philosopher. The stuff about the Mirror Neuron Algorithm, and about instinct and the state and happiness. A lot of that stuff comes from a book called, Viaje a la Vida, Journey to Life, by Eduardo Punset.
I like to draw from Spanish literature, because I feel like it’s an influence that is exclusive to us. Many of those works have not been translated, so we have the privilege of being the first ones to have access to that knowledge, and maybe develop it in new ways for larger audiences.
Any chance that Essays on Empathy coming to consoles?
Jordi de Paco: No. For now, it’s only for Windows, because there was an issue that we discussed, that these are games that span around six years now. So going into those projects to port them would be a nightmare. I don’t know, maybe some time in the future, anything can happen.
For now, these are, as we said, underground pieces of software. Handle them with care.
Essays on Empathy releases on Steam for PC on May 18.