Interview with Eevi Korhonen, Narrative Designer on Returnal

It’s a joy to have workmates like Eevi, whose passion for building worlds with fine details exudes from her being as she describes the tapestry of narrative ornaments that she has strung all around the latest AAA game from Housemarque. Even hearing her chat about the latest Live Action Roleplay that she attended or getting to do press interviews with her, it all paints a picture of these worlds that she is a part of and briefly takes the listener there with her.

Knowing that her expertise is a part of the team that makes projects like Returnal is a comforting factor. With the high pressure of the creative industry and a global pandemic, there is something special about knowing that at least some things are in good hands.

So as Eevi is a storyteller by trade, it seems only right to let her tell her story, and maybe let you grasp a glimpse of the world that a narrative designer of a video game inhabits.

Mikael: For starters, can you think of any inspirations with games from early on in your life?

Eevi: One of my earliest memories of games was watching my big brother play on his Atari. He didn’t like me coming into his room, so I’d just stand outside his doorway and peek in, wondering how he controlled those little images on the screen. Then my best friend got the NES and I’d watch him play, but every time he pushed the controller towards me and asked me to play, I’d just get scared. Controlling the character myself was just too exciting for me as a child.

I don’t remember what the eventual turning point was, but afterwards it was just like floodgates had opened. I got my own consoles (a PS1 and a SNES) and when the family computer got upgraded, I also started playing on that. I was just devouring RPGs, point-and-click adventures and platformers. And when my parents bought me the new PS2, I remember being in such a rush to carry it up to my room that I tripped on the stairs and got a big bump on my forehead. But I just quickly got up and kept on running.

Did that impact the way you found the games industry?

I was a bit of a late bloomer in this regard. Game development wasn’t very visible in the mainstream media when I was growing up, so while I played a lot of games, I just somehow missed that games could be my profession.

I was also a huge bookworm and was fascinated by languages, so I knew I wanted to do something with them. I went to university to study English translation and during that time I went to London as part of my exchange year. I picked a course called Game Cultures, thinking it would just be a fun semester or maybe a way to get into games localization. It turned out to be my eureka moment, realizing that I could both make games and be good at it.

How has your journey in the industry been so far?

I did finish that degree in translation, but I immediately applied for another Bachelor in Media. I chose it because the school had a vibrant student-led game development club, which I got involved in. We organised events like game jams, small conferences and summer game projects. I was torn between wanting to be a designer and a producer and often took up both of those roles in smaller projects.

I only spent about a year and a half at the university before I was whisked away abroad. Part of this new degree was a mandatory international internship, and I found mine in Scotland, working for a company called Denki. My title was both Development Assistant and Denki Champion, and I did everything from doing market research and playtesting to writing blog posts (that still haunt the back corners of the internet). I got to see how a game company is run and try out so many different aspects of game development. I’ll be forever grateful to them for giving me that chance and for providing such a great start to my career.

After that I moved to Berlin and joined Wooga for another internship. I quickly dropped the intern title and worked my way up to Product Manager. I worked full-time on a Facebook game called Kingsbridge (now sadly shuttered) while finishing my thesis. It was also where I got my first taste of writing and narrative design, as I designed and wrote the whole PvE campaign for it.

After being abroad for over two years, I returned back to Finland. I worked for a while for Secret Exit and Sulake, but then I got the opportunity to work at Remedy and I leaped at it. Over the years, I had finally figured out that design was what I wanted to do, but there seemed to be something missing still. I wanted to do design on narratively ambitious games, and Remedy was the place for that.

During my first year there, I worked on a couple of mobile game prototypes before the internal mobile division was closed and we were moved to help ship Quantum Break. We came in during the final months, and it was one of those sink-or-swim moments. I created a process for an internal user research test and ran them while also working on the optional collectables – another tiny step towards working in narrative design.

After Quantum Break, I briefly worked on Crossfire HD on its narrative design (and dipped my toe very briefly in the level design pool but that was not my jam). Then I got the opportunity to work on Control, which I had been intrigued by since its inception. I moved to work on it as a feature designer, but I think my narrative bent was at that point so clear to outsiders that I was asked if I wanted to become a narrative designer instead. I gladly took the role, even though I still didn’t quite know what it meant. I did piece it together as I went along and developed my skill set with heavy focus on worldbuilding and narrative system design.

Later on, I started to experience the beginnings of a burn out. In the end I had to choose between continuing on the project and my health, and I chose the latter. I had experienced some mild burnouts before, but this one took the cake so to speak.

Then I heard about this interesting opportunity at Housemarque – they were looking for a narrative designer for a new AAA roguelite game with dark themes. It felt new and bold and getting the chance to work on it from such an early stage was a chance I could not pass on. I jumped aboard and the results can now be seen in Returnal.

Another major factor why Housemarque appealed to me was the focus on employee wellbeing. Here I feel that I am valued, supported and listened to both as a professional in my field and as an expert in my own wellbeing. I have been given time to recover from my burnout and I’ve been able to transition to a four-day work week, which has improved my life immensely. As a result, I feel more productive and happy at work.

With such a wide spectrum of experiences in the industry, what are your most memorable moments or experiences?

My own career tracks with a lot of those changes. Working for mobile companies in the early 2010s, I witnessed the arrival of the free-to-play model as a staple of not just mobile but PC and console games in the Western markets. While working for Wooga, I was there for that brief period that witnessed the rise and fall of Facebook games. Working for Remedy, I got to transition into the AAA space and find my true calling in narrative design. And with the last year and a half, I think we’ve seen a global shift towards working from home and remote working, which I think will stay in one form or another even after the pandemic has passed.

Your role includes a spectrum of disciplines, from detail-oriented planning to executing at high fidelity. Can you mention some stages of your work process and how you get your creative process flowing?

As a narrative designer, my focus in the early stages of a project is worldbuilding. I often start by immersing myself in reference materials: project documents, movies, books and, of course, going down that Wikipedia hole to learn as much as I can about the relevant themes and subjects. I trust my subconscious to come up with interesting ideas and solutions, if I just feed it with enough material and give it time to process.

The early parts of the project are so exciting because you don’t know the limits of the world yet, so it feels like everything is still possible. While I’m still researching and feeding my imagination, I start to build the world in my head and try to pin as much of it as I can on paper so I can share it with others and see what resonates and what doesn’t. But because game development is iterative and often volatile, the world is never quite finished.

“The early parts of the project are so exciting because you don’t know the limits of the world yet, so it feels like everything is still possible.”

I’m constantly juggling and designing different aspects of the narrative depending on what is most critical and what other teams need in order to do their work: writing briefs and descriptions for concept artists, figuring out what kind of systems we need to tell the story, providing feedback on scripts so that they can move to the next step, syncing with other designers and mining their feature ideas for ideas and thinking of ways we can incorporate narrative into them and so on.

A big part of my work is also to communicate the narrative to everybody else working on the game. In an ideal world I could just telepathically transfer that sense to everybody else, but in the real world I’m stuck using communication just like the rest of us, so I put together world bibles, feature specs, mood boards and anything that works in communicating what the narrative should feel and look like.

My absolute favorite part of the process is naming things. I love revealing things about the world through names and trying to come up with our own unique terminology, so we don’t sound like other games in the genre. Finding an evocative yet snappy name for critical concepts and items is one of the most satisfying parts of my job.

Assuming all of this translates to your off hours as well, do you have any hobbies that may overlap with your professional life?

Well, my love of games isn’t just a foundation for my career, but a big part of my hobbies as well. It also transcends the border between digital and analogue: board games, card games, LARPs and TTRPGs are all staples of my life outside of Housemarque. I am always curious to try out anything that marries together the story and mechanics, and supports player agency in storytelling. It’s a great way to get inspired and think about narrative design in new ways.

One of my most impactful experiences I’ve had in my life happened in the College of Wizardry LARPs. LARP, if you’re not familiar with the term, comes from live-action roleplay and is basically where roleplay meets theater. And in the College of Wizardry games, like the name implies, you’re playing a character that goes to college in a Harry Potter-like world. The game takes place in this gorgeous castle in Poland with a wonderfully wonky layout and actual secret passageways. Most runs are unique, so you don’t have to learn the backstory from previous games and can bring almost any kind of character to play. I’ve gone now five times altogether and three of those I played a professor character called Ursula Rozman.

Ursula Rozman on the set of a fantastical real-world location. Photo by Przemysław Jendroska — Ursula Rozman on the set of a fantastical real-world location.
Photo by Przemysław Jendroska

Rozman was very unlike me in so many ways, which is another thing I love about LARP. It allows you to explore and play with different social roles or aspects of your own personality. You can even take a lot of the things you’ve experienced in the games and apply them to your own life, especially the social skills. Many people report that after they’ve played e.g. a confident leader that they were able to embody those aspects in their real life. So it’s not only fun, but potentially life-changing!

Any specific revelations from outside the industry that inspire your work?

Oh, there’s lots of things! I like a lot of weird and creepy things, but what I’ve really enjoyed recently is horror anthology podcasts. I’ve been a fan of Welcome to Nightvale for a long time (I’ve even gone to the live shows whenever they come to Finland), but last summer I stumbled on The Magnus Archives which just grabbed me and wouldn’t let me go. It was the reason I managed to keep going outside during the hardest parts of the pandemic year, because I’d only listen to it on those walks. I finished that earlier this year and I’ve been hankering for more, so now I’m listening to Old Gods of Appalachia.

And finally, how did working on Returnal personally impact you?

Returnal was the first AAA game I worked on from preproduction all the way to launch, so it is very special to me in that regard. I have been so lucky to work on two AAA games with female protagonists and quite weird and dark themes back-to-back, but in this one I really got to make my mark on it and see my little darlings all the way to the finished product (and also be the one to kill them when it was clear that they didn’t fit the tone or scope).

I’ve gained a lot more insight into my craft, what I’m good at and what I can still learn from. It’s given me the confidence to start mentoring others in the field. And while I know my brand is making weird and dark things, I'm still open to exploring other genres and themes.

So maybe some of these learnings from Returnal could inspire future ideas?

Well, I still want to develop what a Housemarque narrative looks like. I want to be even more ambitious with our future games on how we can fuse the narrative and the gameplay mechanics together, and give the player more agency through that.

One particular thread that I’d still like to follow deeper is evolving storytelling. What I mean by that is that a player's knowledge of and/or relationship with a feature would evolve over time. It sounds pretty simple when you put it like that, but this was a necessity in Returnal since players would repeatedly encounter the same items and places. So for example, the Databank entries would uncover more information the more times you killed an enemy or picked up an item.

I don’t want to spoil anything, but I think one of my favorite moments in Returnal is after reaching the Act 2 ending, the player will learn something that will completely recontextualize something that they’ve seen very often in the game, something that they’ve probably stopped noticing altogether until this new piece of information turns it all upside down. So hopefully in the future I get to create more moments like that.