What is Soulframe, exactly? It’s more than just fantasy Warframe, with an open overworld and more measured combat than the latter’s high-flying space ninja antics. It’s not a Souls-like, either; difficulty is manageable, and the name is more of a coincidence than anything else. During TennoCon earlier this year, I even heard a developer refer to Soulframe as a “secret cozy game.”
After spending a dozen or so hours with its alpha version, I don’t know if I’d go that far – combat is still your primary means of engaging with the world – but it does focus on stories of redemption, tales that wrap around to being uplifting in their own way. One begins by introducing players to a bear. Then things get weird in a way that might be a first for any game, regardless of genre.
The quest, coming to the alpha “Preludes” version of Soulframe later this year, drips with whimsy, weirdness, and toward the end, ursine intestinal fluid. After subduing a bear-shaped forest keeper corrupted by the environment-destroying influence of the game’s primary enemy faction, you send your Floppet – basically a winged rat – inside it to excise the source of the corruption. The moment comes more or less out of nowhere, a reminder that, yep, this is a game from the people who made Warframe.
But how do you model a bear’s esophagus and stomach for exploratory purposes? Where do you even start?
“I searched online for images of bear throats and any other variant available,” Soulframe lead environment artist Enrico Santi told Aftermath. “It’s tricky because there are not as many images of a bear's throat as one would think. So you have to use what resources are available, like the throats of other creatures: humans, for example, and whatnot. You have to trust your instincts as an artist to make the iterations that feel visually in line with the overall aesthetic.”
“There is a running gag that I watched over 40 hours of bear colonoscopy videos,” he added. “It was not the case, unfortunately.”
Soulframe’s world is one in which a flying rat can venture inside the oozing body of a fucked-up bear and emerge out the back end unscathed beyond a need to cough up what I can only describe as “fart fumes,” so you will not be surprised to learn that Santi took some creative liberties with the bear’s internal structure.
"When it comes to making levels for games, you have to 'find the fun' first, so usually we will change things up even if they don't really make sense, as long as it's fun to play and look at,” said Santi. “As for the grossness, yeah, that’s sometimes a part of the fun, believe it or not. The stomach material was some fleshy monstrosity I put together, and then the bumpiness in the stomach was all thanks to [principal environmental artist] Declan Hart, who came in last minute and gave it a real nice facelift."
While striking, the sequence only lasts a minute or so. Despite this, the Soulframe team refused to phone it in.
"It was a tricky 'level,' I guess you could call it,” said Santi. “You spend so little time in there, but it still has to be interesting. I think the stomach went through four or five different iterations, while the throat was pretty much good to go at the second version. Everything is one constant big iteration; you rarely ever see a level or piece of content that survives the first draft."
Looking at pictures of and then spending dozens of hours inside meticulously rendered bear guts, you’d think, would make one’s own guts churn, but Santi is not just any person. His family found themselves caught up in a civil war in Sierra Leone when he was very young, which he says has given him a “unique” perspective.
"My parents and I survived by pure luck, and I don't fully remember everything that happened, but I do have flashes of some of the things I saw,” Santi said. “The rest were stories I found online or [that] were told to me by my parents. So in a way, I was basically desensitized at a very young age. I think because of that experience, I am less likely to react to more authentic imagery. … Even when I worked on Call of Duty WWII, the character team used pictures of real cadavers from that war for their work, and a lot of them had a hard time creating those assets. But to me, it was just a part of my life from long ago that I have since reconciled with."
