Interview | OFF

18 août 2025

Mortis GhostI'd say that OFF is an old-school, Japanese-inspired RPG where you play as a mysterious baseball player. His mission is to "purify" the strange world he inhabits. To do so, you must exterminate ghosts (and other disgusting creatures), follow the advice of a big-headed cat, and wander through the cubic, colorful alleys of the three explorable zones. It's a weird, funny, and unsettling game.

Mortis GhostI don't remember the exact date. I finished OFF in 2008, then uploaded it to a few French-speaking amateur game-making forums. I got around fifty players, and I thought that was a great success! A little while later, Quinn contacted me to ask if she could translate the game into English. I had no reason to refuse. Once she finished her work and uploaded it, things started to snowball. I remember that with Alias Conrad Coldwood, the composer of the original version's music, we were incredibly surprised to see the first cosplays of the game's characters. It was a shock!

Mortis GhostAt the time, I was deeply struck by Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, which contains a very important twist. That twist was the starting point for my scenario. As for the game's formal elements, it was a patchwork of images I had made before starting to work on it: a cat, a baseball player, and a very cubic world because it made for easy-to-produce and arrange backgrounds. The rest of the elements came later, and I made sure they aligned with what already existed in the project.

Mortis GhostIt's hard to explain — that's often how works of fiction are made: a mix of varied inspirations, which, once combined and sprinkled with the creator's personality, give birth to something new. I did a bit of "shopping" in the works you mentioned, and many others, to pick the basic elements of my world. I didn't overthink it.

Mortis GhostThe music isn't my doing. In the original version, it was composed by Alias Conrad Coldwood, and for the new one, it's the work of several artists, including Toby Fox and Morusque. They're the ones you should be asking!

For the graphics, it was a mix of choices dictated by technical constraints (and a few of my own "comfort" decisions) and a personal attempt to make something highly readable and impactful. By limiting each environment to a single color tone, and characters to black and white, I ensured that important elements stood out on screen. And, of course, I wanted to make something original and weird. I think I didn't do too badly!

Mortis GhostI hate being frustrated in video games myself, so that was important for me. Specifically regarding the scenario, I think a good way to avoid frustrating the player – without giving them too many answers – is to be generous with surprising situations and original content. That's something I tried to do throughout the adventure.

That said, I think you're being pretty generous in your analysis – OFF can be frustrating in certain design choices I made back then! But well, without frustration, there's no challenge, right? You need at least a little bit for a game to be fun.

Mortis GhostIt's very hard for me to step outside my own vision of what the game is and tells. But I think OFF now belongs more to the community than to me. I'm both admiring and grateful for all the attention and effort that's been put into my little game, and I'm constantly amazed by the scale of it. My life would be quite different today if OFF hadn't enjoyed such success.

Mortis GhostThe whole team is very careful not to alter the game's original atmosphere. As I said earlier, we believe OFF now belongs more to the community than to us. So we've done our best to preserve its unique feel. That said, since the original version of OFF remains freely available to everyone, we didn't bite our nails down to the quick. The new soundtrack is an important element of this edition — while staying close in tone to what Alias Conrad Coldwood created, it will give the adventure a fresh new flavor. I think it'll be interesting for veteran players to rediscover familiar places, but with this special new spice.

Mortis GhostSince I've practiced both mediums in parallel, it's obvious they're connected in my mind, and so they inspire each other. But there's a major difference that, in my view, makes you approach storytelling quite differently. Comics are the art of the ellipse par excellence — there's literally a cut between each panel, and it's up to the reader to connect the dots. Video games have almost no cut in their storytelling: you control a character and witness each of their actions in a "1:1" timeline. These are diametrically opposite narrative constraints. That's also what makes writing for both fields interesting.

Mortis GhostI love strange artistic works, whatever the medium, but I also play a lot of mainstream games. I remain a huge weeb (editor's note: fan of anime and manga), so many of my choices lean toward Japanese productions. In the most recent games I've played that are relatively "vanilla" (editor's note: base version without mods or expansions), I can mention the Ys and Monster Hunter franchises, both of which I love.