The Endless Forest

Inspirations

The game is profiled as a "jeu d'auteur" where games evolve towards a medium with the artistic expressiveness of cinema and literature, instead of consumer goods.

The Ename Ruin was originally part of the Ename Actueel group art exhibition organized by the Provincial Archeological Museum in the small town of Ename in Belgium. The concept for the exhibition was the idea of the Tardis, a time-and-space-travel device featured in the Doctor Who television series. The idea was that you step into a box of which the inside seems much larger than you would expect from seeing the outside. And when you step out again, you are in a different place.

The museum is built near an archeological site where an abbey was built over the remains of a fortress to defend against the French Kingdom. For the exhibition, Tale of Tales created a ruin of the gothic Saint Salvator church, based on actual measurements. The exhibition visitors could steer the deer through the forest, but when the deer went to sleep, the soul of the visitor escaped and started floating through the forest. If a new visitor found a soul, they could convert the pagan souls. If you did well, at the end of the day, a grave was erected near the ruin. If the majority of the remaining souls was left unchristened, a pagan idol would show up instead of a grave. The amount of graves and idols depended on the visitors. The configuration at the end of the exhibition is now used in the full version of the game, and is to remain that way forever.

The glowing symbols between the antlers are inspired by the vision that was received by Saint Hubert. He was an 8th century nobleman who converted to Christianity after seeing a crucifix between the antlers of the stag he was hunting.

The deer's humanoid faces are reminiscent of the anime movie Princess Mononoke by Hayao Miyazaki, which features a similar theme. According to the concept artist, Lina Kusaite, however, there are several other occurrences of similar creatures in different cultures. Frida Kahlo's self portrait as a hunted stag is one. And Buraq, the horse that carried the Islamic prophet Muhammad to heaven and back, is often depicted with a human face.