Get to know this ambitious Spanish game now available on PS4 and PS5.
It’s been a few years now The Crown of Wu it began its journey through a long development not without obstacles, but it has finally come to fruition. It’s about a Spanish game of puzzles, platforms and combats in third person developed by Red Mountain and inspired by the classic Chinese tale Journey to the West which narrates the adventure of the Monkey King, Sun Wukong. With the support of the PlayStation Talents program and the Trazos school, The Crown of Wu is already a reality that can be played on PS4 and PS5although it will arrive later on Steam.
In the presentation of the game, many details of its developmentas well as the difficulties that its creators have gone through. Jose Carlos Montero is the creative director of the game and a teacher at the Trazos school who has developed this idea with a team of just seven people who has put his heart and soul into his first video game project. When The Crown of Wu was just a concept, they traveled to different fairs to make themselves known and thus new opportunities arose for them.
“At first it was a pilot project and we didn’t know how the final result was going to be”, recognizes Montero in the first minutes. This is how he reveals the details of a more rugged development than usual, where they were always aware of the resources they had. An indie development that started his first company TRT Labs who had many virtual reality projects. However, the pandemic and the immediate confinement caused the cancellation of these jobs and the closure of the company. From those embers was born what is today Red Mountaina small team that is now launching its first video game with great enthusiasm.
A game where difficulty is a challenge
Initially the programmers entered Asier Cabrera and Alejandro Royo to shape The Crown of Wu, already under the umbrella of PlayStation Talents that promotes Spanish talent in the video game industry. For years, PlayStation Spain has supported the homeland independent development to accommodate new adventures in the console catalog. An opportunity that Red Mountain was not going to waste. At the same time, several students from the school strokes who have done an enormous job with the artistic design and the classrooms became his second home.
The result is a “fairly consistent game that can be enjoyed”in the words of Montero who highlights the game difficulty in combat and platforming. Even the puzzles are the most satisfying part of The Crown of Wu with whom you can have a good time. The goal of the development team was always to create a game “very nice with immersive environments“. A titanic design effort that found good allies at the 2019 Fun & Serious Games Festival, the biggest gaming event that is celebrated on our borders and where the best games developed in Spain.
Opportunity at fairs
When the game was a skeleton, it walked through different national fairs until Wild Cat Records and Red Mountain met at the aforementioned Fun & Serious. The responsible for the soundtrack from The Crown of Wu are Alex Elósegui and Sergio Villar Camino who had been making soundtracks for independent cinema for some time. They are defined as passionate about video games and after contacting José Carlos Montero, they did a sample that the team liked a lot. Thus began his adventure to give sound to a game with traditional influences, but with a dark setting.
“We wanted it to be a more incidental music that was not the protagonist”explained Alex Elósegui in his speech. “Are very short melodies less in the bosses that develop more with the progression, introducing new instruments”he concludes. “The instrument also behaves differently according to Wu’s actions“highlighted Villar for his part and added that the music is a bit more powerful when the fighting comes against bosses to be up to the moment.