In Looking for Fael, you are thrown into Fael’s many apartments looking for your missing roommate.
You’ll travel from an empty cinema room to an abandoned version of your place, taken by Nature to a cold office room and so much more.
All those apartments didn’t come out of nowhere and were all thoughtfully inspired by various pop culture works.
Tsutomu Nihei
Benoit Leloup -also known as Beloup-, lead art designer on Looking for Fael, was strongly inspired by a manga author, Tsutomu Nihei, who wrote and drew BLAME!
His cold gigantic cities were definitely an inspiration for the game.
The idea was to think how we can make the player feel small in a closed space that is the size of an apartment.
Looking for Fael is visually far from Tsutomu Nihei’s works, but the unsettling atmosphere he manages to create through his architecture was definitely an inspiration.
- Beloup’s concept art for the bunker apartment. Can you feel the cyberpunk inspiration?
From what you’ve played in the demo, which apartment gives you this “I should not be here” feeling the most?
The Truman Show
In this movie, Jim Carrey is the main character of a reality TV show. He lives in a fake city built only for him and for the viewers to watch.
When he discovers it, he travels behind the fake settings, behind the scenes of his reality.
This is a central theme to Looking for Fael too. For you, as a player, might feel like Truman yourself while exploring the apartments because the deeper you go, the closer to get to this maze’s backbone.
- One of the first prototypes for a cinema apartment. Could be a great place to watch the Truman Show right?
House of leaves
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski is a book about a family moving into a house that inexplicably grew a huge maze of dark corridors in the living room.
The inspiration is pretty obvious for Looking for Fael, a game where your mysterious roommate attached different versions of your apartment to your front door.
- A perfectly normal apartment, with no extra hidden rooms…
However, unlike House of Leaves, Looking for Fael is not a horror story. It is one about reflection, and about getting lost in reality itself…
Are you ready for the journey?
There are many more films, games, and books that were an inspiration to Looking for Fael, but we don’t want to tell you everything just yet.
As of now you can go play Looking for Fael’s demo and see if you can find any other work that inspired the game!