It’s hard to underestimate the impact of samurai cinema on modern pop culture. These black-and white films from directors like Akira Kurosawa inspired countless other stories of honor and combat — most recently, in Trek to Yomi, May’s side-view samurai epic.
Polish developer Flying Wild Hog is not shy about its title’s historical and cultural inspirations, and the studio is insistent that Yomi is intended to be more of a cinematic experience as a Kurosawa simulator. Game Rant sat down with the Hogs to discuss how the team achieved that goal and how support from a major indie publisher helped them get there. The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: Tell me a little bit about Trek to Yomi — its gameplay, story, and key elements.
A: Trek to Yomi is a game, but one of its unique selling points is an old samurai movie experience. We really wanted to make something that, when you are playing, you can feel the atmosphere from these movies.
The second pillar is authenticity. We spent a lot of time and did a lot of research to present the Edo period of Japan in our game, with many points that are historically authentic. We translated all English text in the game into the old Japanese language, and we recorded voice overs using that language. We also, for example, use a composer that uses old Japanese instruments to record game music to create a similar atmosphere. This is the second major point in this project.
Of course, the combat in Trek to Yomi centers around samurai fights. We spent a lot of time making combat that would help create the atmosphere of these old samurai movies. Most of the combat is one-on-one, but there are some places where you fight many enemies in arenas. To connect the combat with the movie experience, we had to make some gameplay decisions. For example, we removed jumping from the game, because in old samurai movies you don’t see many actors jumping. We also chose to use a minimalistic UI system, because we didn’t want to break the immersion from the game.
If we were just making a game, we would have used different mechanics, but we started from the idea of creating an old samurai movie experience — that was our main goal in the project.
Q: There’s a lot to unpack there, but let’s start first with the idea of authenticity. Several Western developers as of late have released games inspired by Eastern cinema, and some have garnered criticism for how they handled that dichotomy. How did your studio approach authenticity as a focus when developing Trek to Yomi?
A: That was one of our core pillars. We had to make sure that everything we were doing was always checked and that it was correct in terms of the vibe of the game and in terms of its setting of Edo period Japan.
We did this on a few layers, the first of which was our team. In this inner circle, we brainstormed a lot before doing anything with our team of level designers. We thought about what sort of things we would want to have in the game. We had some initial inspirations from other games. But, after some research, we decided that we would just cut some elements because, after checking, we realized that some things were not correct for the history or the mood of the game.
We based Yomi on a lot of sources. Samurai movies, of course: films from Akira Kurosawa and Masaki Kobayashi. There are a lot of references and parts of the game that look like some of those masterpieces. On the other hand, we took some references from manga and anime series like Ninja Scroll, Berserker, and Samurai Champloo. Those are just some titles that we took into consideration as part of our research, but we also consulted a lot of books about historical elements, outfits, and weapons. We did a lot of research into the weapons that appear in the game, even the crazy ones like the hand cannon, which is actually a historically-accurate element that we researched.
We also had the good luck to find a great team to work on this game, not just developers on the crew, but also people supporting us outside of the studio. For example, we had a historian, who lives in the United States but has heritage from Japan, who knows a lot about Japanese history and was constantly engaged in every milestone check up that we had with our publisher, Devolver Digital, and with other people.
She was very straightforward in her feedback. She would say things like, ‘this is another part of the Shinto religion,’ or ‘this is not how buildings were made at this time,’ and we just took all of that and implemented it into the game to make it as close as possible to authentic. Devolver Digital also gave us the opportunity to work with Kakehashi Games, a Japanese developer focused on releasing games for that market. They have really extensive knowledge about the culture, so they were also involved in terms of localization.
Q: Let’s talk about the combat a bit, since that’s one of the main parts of Yomi. Some other contemporary games of a similar genre, like Ghost of Tsushima, have become pretty well-known for their fluid combat. Did that concept play into the devs’ work on combat at all?
A: In many places, we are compared to Ghost of Tsushima. This is a totally different type of game. Trek to Yomi has a play time of around five hours, and in that amount of time we cannot add as many elements as in a game like Ghost. People also compare Trek to Yomi to some fighting games like Mortal Kombat, but this is only because the movement is similar. In a game like Mortal Kombat, players take many hours to learn how to play properly. That’s not a system we can use in a five-hour game.
Also, when comparing Yomi to other games like Mark of the Ninja or Katana Zero, it’s important to remember that jumping was a big part of those games’ level designs. In Yomi, you fight on just one level, so we decided to make our combat very focused on proper timing and the distance between the player and enemies. We give players some elements and some combos and then put them up against different AI enemies, and they need to figure out how to properly fight each one.
Q: It sounds to me like I’m not the first person to compare Yomi to Ghost of Tsushima, and that you don’t feel like it's a fair comparison. Do people often say that? Do you find that frustrating as a smaller studio?
A: On one hand, we’re proud that people compare our game to Ghost of Tsushima, but it’s hard to create an expectation that Yomi is like Ghost. It is a totally different game and we focus mostly on this old movie experience, and the feeling of these classic Japanese movies. Ghost of Tsushima is a huge project with a much bigger story, a much bigger world, and many other elements, not just the fighting. If someone were to go into Trek to Yomi with the expectation that it’s anything like Ghost of Tsushima, that’s no good for us, because our game is totally different.
Getting compared to games like Ghost of Tsushima was, at one point, flattering, but we are trying to be very transparent and fair with our players about what kind of game we made. Maybe that’s something we need to improve on for the future, but we were always working to make sure that we were clear that Yomi is a very cinematically-based title.
We’re very humbled that people are comparing us to those titles and describing Yomi as a game that can compete with them, but we are going in our own way, trying to show players something special and unique from Japanese culture. Also, as another point, the original design for Trek to Yomi was created before Ghost launched. We created our first prototype and started discussions about this project before Ghost of Tsushima had even come out.
Q: Let’s chat about the development process a little bit. You mentioned that Devolver Digital is your publisher. When did they get involved, and how?
A: We’ve worked with Devolver for many years, starting with the first Shadow Warrior game. In around March of 2020 we were cooperating with Devolver for their E3-like showcase event, which was going to be virtual because it was pandemic time. While we were working on that project, we received information and a presentation from our team about Trek to Yomi from an independent developer who was not working with Flying Wild Hog. We started discussions with Devolver about the game at that point because, from our perspective, this project presented a very nice, unique new idea for a game.
At some point during the project’s development, all sides realized that Trek to Yomi had a lot of potential as a small indie title, and we extended its production, because we thought that if we added a bit of time and some additional resources to the project we could get much bigger results. At the end, we had about tripled the number of cinematics and extended the amount of elements we could put in combat, for example.
Q: Do you feel that support from Devolver allowed the devs to achieve their full potential in developing Yomi?
A: We love to work with Devolver. They’re very similar to Flying Wild Hog in that they do a lot of experimentation, and they have a very unique style of developing. From that perspective, cooperating with Devolver was a very good idea.
Our production crew was also very lucky because we found a really great partner on the Devolver side, Mark Lloyd, who gave us a lot of tips. Mark is a game dev veteran from Rockstar Games, who worked on big titles like Grand Theft Auto and so on. His knowledge and experience was outstanding, and he shared that all with us.
In terms of growth, Flying Wild Hog and Devolver were established in 2009, around the same time, so both companies have around 13 years of experience. Working with Devolver, we had a big opportunity to grow both in terms of staff and in terms of the quality of our work.
Q: So, the team behind Yomi felt like the game had some potential to make waves. Now that it’s been available for some time, how has the player base responded? What sort of feedback are you getting?
A: Right now, it’s still too early to say. We are still receiving some opinions about the game, and we’re still fixing some bugs that we had on release. We still want to create and even better version of the game and support the players even after release.
From people who expected the cinematic experience of a samurai movie from Trek to Yomi, we’re getting pretty good opinions. People who were looking for more of an arcade game are giving us different opinions. We did, though, create an easy mode for players who really want to focus on the story — during testing we got some feedback that players loved the experience, but the gameplay was too hard in some places.
Q: I want to build on that point. We’ve talked about people possibly getting the wrong idea about Yomi based on the way it’s been compared to other titles. It’s clear that your game is more an experience than it is a side-scrolling button masher. Do you think that conversation surrounding Yomi has affected the way people interact with it? Is that something you want to correct on the record here?
A: People can always create their own expectations, and play the game however they want to. In any title where you don’t give the player what they expect, they’ll just leave a review, and that’s normal. In many places we have said that Yomi is a very new, unique cinematic experience. We’re selling that as the main focus for this project. The word ‘experiment’ is very important in the entire conversation about Yomi. This is a completely new IP. With some bigger titles, you can probably recognize what to expect. Here, it’s more like a ‘cat in a sack,’ in that you don’t necessarily know what the game will look like going in.
I think this is part of our journey as game developers, to learn, observe, and get some feedback. We’re very happy that the majority of people think the game is good. Not every review is positive, though, and while that isn’t the best type of feedback to read, there is always something to learn. In a way, it’s a form of gratitude, because this person is spending time to leave a review and maybe suggest how we can make Trek to Yomi better. At the studio, we still have a lot of potential to show, and we hope people will like Trek to Yomi after the improvements and that they’ll like some of our upcoming projects, too.
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Trek to Yomi is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.