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After 13 years on Dying Light, Tymon Smektala is keen to spot the freshest talent in horror as Broken Mirror Games’ new executive director – perhaps even “the next Kojima”, he says.
“I will feel satisfied and I will feel fulfilled when we will actually find a creator like that,” Smektala tells GamesRadar+ in an interview, joined by Piotr Babieno, Bloober Team CEO. “I can easily imagine that we will find a creator that – a game creator working on a smaller project, but we would see the strength of the vision there, and with our help, this developer would get bigger, would get better, would get access to our DNA as well, because we have lots of expertise in making horror games. This creator could become the next Kojima, even. Like, why not?”
Those might sound like big words, but Smektala’s done it before. He served as franchise director for three of his 13 years working on Dying Light at developer Techland, where the series rose to the ranks of the best zombie games of all time due to its pioneering of day/night time cycles that posed new challenges to open-world survival horror. Plus, the Bloober Team publishing subsidiary is already hard at work on a number of upcoming horror games.
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From Saw: Genesis’ more involved approach to the asymmetrical multiplayer to Switch 2-exclusive Onyx’s focus on “putting fear back into your hands” (in a literal sense), Smektala is excited to continue the search for novel approaches to the big, bad world of horror.
“What we are trying to do is get the next Obsession, the next Backrooms, the next Weapons,” he says, citing some of the biggest horror movies of the year – including one dreamed up by a content creator – that offer “A new take on horror, something that adds to the genre and is unique. That’s kind of the top-level ambition: to find the next creators of horror gaming that can complete and add to what we are bringing to the table as Broken Mirror.”
“It’s not just pure entertainment, and it’s not just about uniqueness. It’s about something behind it all,” says Babieno. “The best horrors are, in some way, answering the questions which are arising in society because we are afraid about something. That’s why I believe that there are a lot of content creators who are able to touch [upon] horror from different perspectives, and we would like to be there.”
Broken Mirror’s Onyx: The Dark Grip is an upcoming Switch 2 game that was made for the handheld experience, and there’s many more Nintendo-exclusives besides…