EA's triple-A Immortals of Aveum isn’t just an RPG-shooter: “We spent a lot of time on puzzles, too”

“Puzzle designing is a very challenging thing to do as a designer,” says Bret Robbins, Ascendant Studios founder, and boss of the whole Immortals of Aveum operation. The game – as well as being a ‘Doctor Strange-like magic first-person shooter’ – contains puzzles; tricky brainteasers you’re going to need to apply skills and abilities to in order to progress. It’s something we’ve seen in the likes of Doom and Doom Eternal, as well as in the combat sandboxes of the Halo games: smart ways of extrapolating FPS tools to make you think about the world in a deeper way than you would in a CoD or a Battlefield.

“My hats off to games that do puzzle design in a very good way,” continues Robbins. “We spent a lot of time on the puzzles in Aveum. It really has a huge impact on how you do the level design – they tend to be very dependent on how you build out the area, so it’s not an easy thing to just put into a level. You have to design the level with it in mind.”

Robbins goes on to explain that the game has some “pretty unique mechanics that come out of your spellcasting abilities”, and gives us a little teaser about the sort of trickery we can expect to solve once the game is in our hands. The most intriguing example comes in the form of a ‘beam-spliiting’ puzzle, where you will need to refract light in order to hit certain targets and open up new passageways as you flow through the level.