Aardman Animations, the creator of stop-motion smash hits such as Wallace & Gromit and Chicken Run, is currently developing an open-world video game. According to a job listing on the studio’s official website (via Tech Radar), the company already has a 3D action-adventure prototype in place and is now moving forward to turn it into a fully fleshed game.
Back in 2020, Aardman announced a surprising partnership between the animation studio and the game publisher Bandai Namco. At the time, Aardman promised to develop a “brand new IP,” which means the upcoming game project will have unique characters and setting. Now, the job listing published by Aardman gives us some more details about what they have been working on for the last year.
According to the listing, Aardman is looking to hire people to “help us build a mad, open-world and fill it with compelling stories.” The job description also promises the game “pushes into new design space within the 3D action-adventure genre” and focuses on “inventive mechanics and compelling characters imbued with the humor, love, and craftsmanship you’d expect from Aardman.” While information about this secret project is still scarce, the job listing also underlines how Aardman aims to build “visually unique games for PC and console”, which means their upcoming title will be launched on multiple gaming platforms.
While there are many video games available based on Aardman’s franchises, the company was only directly involved in developing a single title. Aardman was part of the development of 11-11 Memories Retold, a narrative adventure game created by DigixArt, a studio founded by Yoan Fanise, the director of Valiant Hearts: The Great War. Since 11-11 Memories Retold was distributed by Bandai Namco, it’s fair to assume the current partnership between the publisher and Aardman flourished from this earlier encounter.
Since Aardman is acclaimed for its work with stop-motion animation, we could hope that the mystery game the studio is developing brings some of its movie’s charm to players. While using stop-motion for a game is a high request, even more for a small studio, Aardman could use CGI to mimic the technique. As for what the brand new IP could be, imagination is the limit, but whatever the setting of this upcoming open-world game might be, we can expect Aardman’s staple humor to be involved.
As one of the biggest publishers globally, Bandai Namco has a lot of experience distributing video games, both big and small. The next highly-anticipated game to carry Bandai Namco’s seal is Elden Ring, from Dark Souls’ developers, FromSoftware. While Aardman’s game won’t probably be as hard as a FromSoftware game, is worth noticing how Elden Ring is the first fully open-world game created by FromSoftware. That means Bandai Namco will have a lot more experience dealing with the genre while supporting Aardman’s development.
After being delayed, Elden Ring will now come to the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on February 25, 2022.