Interview: Building Bonds And Balancing The Brutality Of Troll And I

When Otto’s world is torn apart, it’s not by the hulking great troll that features in the title, but rather by those who would hunt this mythical creature. The two are thrust together simply to try and survive, with both human mercenaries and creatures breaking through from Troll’s world that they must fight.

Read our hands on preview here, but we also spoke to Creative Director Kevin Oxland and Technical Director Bobby Earl about the game’s development.


TSA: Troll and I is a game that caught my attention because of something that’s really come to the fore in the last four or five years, of having these two rather characters partnered all the way through it. Obviously, there’s older examples such as Ico, but now there’s The Last Guardian, and so on. Was this something you were inspired by?

Kevin Oxland: I think when we started there was one that we really knew about, which was Brothers. Ico was different, where you could only control one character and you had to save the girl, but you couldn’t directly control her. That’s the big difference between ours and almost all the others.

Bobby Earl: I think a lot of people see our game and they say, “That’s a The Last Guardian rip off.” Two years ago, when we started this, nobody really knew what The Last Guardian was going to be!

Kevin: But The Last Guardian, I’ve played it all the way through, and it’s not like our game in any way, apart from that there’s a boy and a big creature. That’s where the similarity ends, I think. There’s a completely different story, obviously, different mechanics, combat, crafting…

TSA: Who do you think’s more loveable? Trico or Troll? [laughs]

Kevin: That’s a tough one, but obviously I’m going to say Troll! [laughs]

TSA: Ah, but you can’t pet Troll, whereas you can pet Trico…

Kevin: When we designed Troll, we kind of wanted him to have a menacing side, as well as a cute side, if you like, so…

TSA: How have you found getting people past that comparisons people make to The Last Guardian? Getting past the comparisons with a much larger game?

Kevin: I mean, once you play it, you realise it’s just not the same game at all, but being compared to it? It’s probably not a bad thing! I mean, The Last Guardian’s pretty damn good, so if people want to say that, then OK!

TSA: One of the interesting things with Troll and I is the time period. When you first see it, you might expect it to be a fantasy world, but it’s actually set in this world?

Kevin: Yeah. We set it in the 50s because we didn’t want technology getting in the way of it, and also it’s just after the war, so there’s quite a nice feel about it. Trolls live in Scandinavia, we all know that, so it’s already got that kind of fantasy feel about it, and they live in the mountains. When the disaster happens, we didn’t want the player to literally go into the fantasy world, so we made cracks in the ground and creatures come out of it, but you don’t actually get to go into it. There’s a kind of mystique to it, if you like, but it’s kind of grounded in our real world.

TSA: You do have some games where you hop between two worlds though, and that can often work quite well.

Bobby: Well, there are a couple of sections where you do go into the troll world a little, but it’s more that the trolls have been here in Scandinavia forever, you just haven’t seen them.

TSA: Hiding under bridges? [laughs]

Bobby: Yes! [laughs] But you get to areas where they’re a bit more established.

Kevin: Yeah, certainly with the troll caves, and later on there’s a larger fracture. You’re always on the fringes though, you’re never literally going there. I quite like that.

TSA: I guess it’s nice to keep things out of reach of the player, a little. One of the other things that makes you wonder about it is the creature design, and you have concept art of more animalistic creatures and it evolved from there.

Kevin: Well we just created concept art for a lot of ideas, basically! Our concept artist took animals as a reference point and it just evolved and evolved until we started to see something we really liked, and then we took that and developed it into what we see now.

We want Troll to be humanoid and we needed to have that aggression, for him to be reasonably strong. It’s a big process and it took quite a while, actually, it was a very iterative process.

Bobby: We had the concepts on paper and then we took that to a CGI studio, MI in Manchester, and we said to them “build us a troll!”

Kevin: We already had a pretty basic one…

Bobby: Yeah, but the first troll we did had a top knot. They didn’t want to model his hair bouncing around everywhere, so they tied it up, and when you saw the silhouette, it just looked like he had a pineapple on his head!

TSA: That is always a risk when you’re going for a top knot, to be fair.

Bobby: So he’s evolved through concept. We took that model, that the CGI guys did, and that base model is what’s used in the game.

TSA: Did you always have a very clear idea of what Troll would be able to do in the world? Perhaps based around the puzzles you wanted to have in the environments?

Kevin: I think we were pretty clear on what we wanted him to do. We trimmed him back a bit, if anything. He had a few more powers using magic, but we wanted him to be strong and big, that was his thing, but also with a soft side as well.

Bobby: For the puzzles, it was always at the forefront of our mind that we had to do things where you’d need both Otto and Troll in order to get over them. There are areas in the game where they’re forced apart, but the things you have to do are trying to bring them back together.

TSA: You do see that in the combat as well, where there’s some smaller enemies that are better at avoiding Troll’s swiping. It took me a couple of fights to realise just how quickly you could switch between them.

Kevin: Well that progresses as you go through the game. The baddies almost cotton onto what the troll can do, and you get different ones coming out. You’ve got one that will curl up into a shell, and he just can’t hit them, so it requires the boy to come in and help out.

Bobby: You also get some of the smaller creatures jumping onto the troll and climbing on his back, so Otto then has to get them off.

TSA: Building that bond between the two characters must be quite challenging when one of them doesn’t speak English. Well, he doesn’t speak, but does he understand? That’s one thing I was wondering.

Kevin: Yeah, that was really hard to get that right, wasn’t it? We kind of wanted him to understand, but didn’t want the player to realise that. As you go through the game and the story unravels, he understands more and more what Otto says, and you get that sense by the gestures and the grunts. He never speaks, but he understands and you see that he understands.

TSA: I guess that at the character level, that helps to build a bond that you can see them getting closer.

Kevin: Exactly. A lot of it’s done through cutscenes, so you see a lot of Otto’s history comes out, and Otto also kind of narrates Troll’s history by the things that he does as well, what the troll is thinking, if you like, so that the player understands.

TSA: A little like Sooty & Sweep, where it’s being interpreted for you? [laughs] Actually, Chewbacca would probably be a better point of reference!

Kevin: [laughs] We did look at [Chewbacca] actually, because that’s a similar relationship, really.

TSA: Similarly hairy, at least!


Thanks to Kevin and Bobby for chatting to us about Troll and I. You can head here for our hands on preview, with the game set to release on 24th March on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC, and a version planned for Nintendo Switch this Spring.

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