Despite not being the sole emphasis, PISCES does involve combat. Battles are large scale and strategic, requiring careful planning to avoid a swift demise. “It’s a paced game,” says Rutkowski. “You have your quiet time figuring out how to defeat the larger enemies that you’ll see. It’s sort of a strategy time mixed with the moments of action. I don’t want to give away too much about it, but way I’d describe it is if you’ve played Shadow of the Colossus. It’s less of the action side of Colossus, half the time. We try to take the misery of dying over and over again out of defeating a larger creature by giving the player time to, almost like a puzzle, figure out what you have to do. To set traps is the best way to describe it.
...One of the things that we’re going to show in the KickStarter is how powerful the PISCES character actually is. She can manifest these black shards that float around her and she can cast them out. Those shards can pull across the ground and create massive boulders that you can use to bash against the larger robots. As she turns more and more human, the thing is that she loses that ability, so she becomes weaker and weaker. What will happen is you will see her as more and more human. She’s evolving beyond just being a machine, and you have to take up the slack, up to the gamer’s character to fulfil that role.”
The enemies in PISCES are really big. “You always need an antagonist in a game, and they’re the driving force you’re going against with PISCES,” Rutkowski says. “The enemy AI is this lumbering, it’s not a dumb AI, but it works off the Lovecraftian idea that human beings are these small, insignificant things next to these gigantic elements in the universe. It’s not like these elements really care about the tiny little ants, we’re just existing on their plane, and they’ll crush us, not maliciously, but just because we’re like ants to them. But if you do piss them off enough, they will hunt you down.”
