Summary
When you ask for the most interesting and exciting game developers this decade, I feel like you’d hear a lot ofLariansandFromSoftwares. Maybe Nintendo’s Zela team would even get a mention purely for themind-bending physics engine of Tears of the Kingdom. But these are all developers who have produced one game this decade. One phenomenal, industry-changing game each, don’t get me wrong, but one game all the same.
Strange Scaffold has already produced 12 games in the first four and a half years of the 2020s, with two more announced for the next year. These 12 games are incredibly varied in tone, mechanics, and presentation. Two are (excellent) sequels, but the other ten are wholly original.
My personal favourites are moody third-person shooter El Paso, Elsewhere, in which you battle addiction and try to kill your vampire ex-girlfriend to stop the end of the world, and Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator, a simulator game where you, well, trade organs on the intergalactic stock market. Shoutout also to the dog JPEGs manning the airport in An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs.
The 12 games are:
First-person shooter I Am Your Beast, which hasone of the best tutorials I’ve ever played, is set to release next month.
Strange Scaffold’s latest game, Clickolding, is an uncomfortable affair where you must click a clicker for a creepy, antlerless moose. Funded by Innersloth’s Outersloth program, it’s a half-hour treatise on how to make a game that sticks with you for hours after its conclusion.
Strange Scaffold is a great developer creating unique games that give old genres new life. Where most developers, even on an indie scale, iterate on ideas, Strange Scaffold creates entirely new ones. Who’d have thought that a game about clicking a little clicker would work, let alone make me feel more uncomfortable than entire triple-A campaigns?
Aside from the unbounded creativity, Strange Scaffold is trying to change the way that games are made. While we don’t know what the working conditions are like at FromSoftware or Larian specifically, in the industry as a whole things are bad. Thousands of developers are being laid off every year and crunch culture persists. Strange Scaffold wants to change this, in its own culture if nowhere else.
The first words you see on the Strange Scaffold website are, “Better, Faster, Cheaper, and Healthier.” It’s a big, bold font making a big, bold statement. The Daft Punk of games development is here for a long time, and it wants to give its developers a good time.
“I get tired of seeing my peers crushed under the wheels of unsustainable processes,” studio founder and creative director Xalavier Nelson Jr. toldPush To Talk. He also explained his “constellation” model of development, in which a rotating cast of developers work on Strange Scaffold’s games. “All the people who I get to collaborate with, we attempt to offer them the most interesting, fairly compensated, flexible work possible,” he explained.
This has been cemented by its collaboration with indie publisher Frosty Pop. “It signals a commitment to continuing to develop world-class games with a sustainability, transparency, and precision that defies the industry status quo,” Nelson Jr. wrote onLinkedIn.
The press release backed up these sentiments. “Strange Scaffold isn’t seeking arbitrary growth, risking the lives of our collaborators and the quality of our projects in the balance,” Nelson Jr. is quoted as saying. “[…] In an industry increasingly focused on live services or just shutting things down if they don’t immediately turn a mega-profit, there’s another way of doing things.”
Strange Scaffold is doing things differently. It’s a studio focused on sustainability and creativity in equal measure. If that’s not enough to be crowned the most interesting developer this decade, I don’t know what is.
