We recently got our hands on Ethan: Meteor Hunter at our weekend at Rezzed last month – along with what seemed like hundreds of other people, because its stand was constantly busy! Developer Seaven Studio have been kind enough to provide us with a preview copy of the game as well as answer some of our questions about their upcoming release.
Ethan: Meteor Hunter is a platformer that mixes puzzle elements, including the unique abilities of pausing time and manipulating objects using the power of the mind. Our hero is a rodent who obtained his telekinetic power from coming into contact with a meteor, and he’s now on a mission to collect fragments of the fallen rocks throughout the fifty levels of the game.
Seaven Studio set out to create a title that appeals to all gamer types: the casuals that don’t have much time to play, the hardcores that must complete everything, and the speedrunners that have to get to the finish line as quickly as possible. They have definitely achieved this with Ethan, and the art style is stunning, the physics give a great feel to the gameplay and the ability to control time is inspired. Check out our gameplay video below, which includes some of my failed attempts at platforming, and be sure to head over to Steam Greenlight to give Ethan: Meteor Hunter the thumbs-up.
Seaven Studio was set up by a group of former Hydravision Entertainment employees after it closed down in September 2012. The team have decided to go ‘full indie’ which has the benefit of getting closer to their target audience during development and are therefore able to share a lot more about their project with their fans. A big thank you to Olivier Penot, Producer & Co-founder for answering our questions below.
Could you tell us a little more about the storyline and its inspiration? Does Ethan get to meet any other characters on his journey?
Ethan is a rat that sees his everyday routine changing after a meteor rain: he was touched by one of the meteors and finds out that he is now able to move objects with telekinesis while he stops time. He will do his best to reach and collect all the meteor fragments that fell from the sky. The plot is inspired by comics in many ways, in as much as our rat is like any other rat who gains superpowers that enable him to do uncommon things, such as moving blocks with the power of his brain. Ethan will see his neighbor throughout his journey because he has a real impact on the story, we will reveal more soon…
We’ve noticed that he has an extremely long tail! Will this become a feature later on in the game?
Indeed he has a long tail but it will not be a feature, it is just that rats have long tails!
We particularly liked the ‘Adorable Saws’ level, where the blades follow you throughout. What came first: the platform or puzzle element?
We tried our best to make a sharp balance between platform and puzzle. But as we want players to speedrun our game and do time-attacks with their friends, platform is used more than puzzle, because it takes more time to solve puzzles than just running and jumping through the obstacle. Here we are all fans of both genres so it’s hard to say which one came first, it just made sense for us.
We also like the fact that every level introduces a different mechanic – the propelled vehicle in the ‘Wood Cleaning’ level is especially inspired! How did you come up with these ideas and how long did it take? Which are you most proud of?
We did not want our game to be like all the others: we picked the best of all the games we loved to make them melt into Ethan: Meteor Hunter. This project is at the crossroads between arcade platformer, puzzle-game and other game genres like shoot’em up, adventure, action or doodle jump-like games! We’ve been working on Ethan: Meteor Hunter for 9 months now and we thought about making these original features appear in the game as soon as we figured out we all loved plaformers, but we also love many other genres. We wanted to see them mixed up with this classic video game genre. We are very proud of the entire game, but the best thing is that we made the game easy to play and hard to master, so anyone can play it: from the person that never plays video games to the most hardcore ones, through to people that only have 20 minutes to play after a long day at work.
Some of the traps are quite brutal and could have lent themselves to more gory visuals. What made you decide to go for non-graphic animations; would you ever consider more gruesome death scenes for Ethan?
Ethan: Meteor Hunter is also inspired by cartoons, and those deaths came from the lust to have fun even if you fail at something while you play. It is a bit like in Wile E Coyote and The Road Runner, it is always fun to see the Coyote die and never frustrating. We wanted to show to the players that it is not a shame to fail at something, it is just another opportunity to reach the goal with another try!
Can you tell us which component of the game you’re currently working on? How are you feeling about its upcoming release?
Polishing, debugging, last minutes changes … It is always a rush when the game is not finished yet, but its content is complete and will be released soon on PC and PS3, when it’s ready. We don’t want to ship an unfinished, buggy game.
We look forward to the final version of Ethan: Meteor Hunter. It’s already looking very complete and plays great; each level has so far presented unique challenges and it’s refreshing to see each introduce a new mechanic.
Thank you to Olivier and the Seaven Studio team for taking the time to answer our questions and allowing us to play a copy of the game.
1001-Up.com 
One thought on “1001 Previews: Ethan: Meteor Hunter”