“Moebius built a world that doesn’t exist, but you can understand it. It’s a realist world. A world you can relate you, but it’s not your world,” says Edouard Caplain, art director for Jusant, the meditative tower climbing adventure that is Life Is Strange studio Don’t Nod’s latest game. Moebius was the pseudonym of French artist Jean Giraud, and whose surreal sci-fi and fantasy landscapes, with washes of contrasting colour and impossibly huge structures of soaring rock, have influenced games for years. You can certainly see that influence in Jusant, too: a world you can understand, though it's quite unlike your own.
RPS slapped on the coveted Bestest Best sticker when reviewing it a few weeks back, calling it “a show don’t tell masterpiece”. A sentiment I can get behind as a long-standing proponent of silent games ever since the Evil Within 2 insisted on puncturing its creepy baroque ambience with consistently stupid dialogue. Jusant comes from a team that know how to write a conversation, though. So why the change of pace this time around?
