In a night filled with gory trailers for loud action games, one of the new reveals at The Game Awards stood out for its gentle nature: Coven of the Chicken Foot. The game defied almost every trend of the night: it was a single-player game, in a beautiful cel-shaded animation style, in which the main character is an elderly woman. This, it turns out, is the first new game from Bruce Straley, one of the co-directors of the original The Last of Us, since he left Naughty Dog in 2017.
In an interview with Polygon, Straley spoke for the first time about his surprise exit from Naughty Dog, soon after shipping his last game with the company, Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End. After 18 years at the developer, Straley found himself struggling with a sense of repetition as the studio settled into making, you know, Naughty Dog sorts of games. (In the two decades prior, the company had also put out both Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter games, before settling on the cinematic action of Uncharted and TLOU, the only game series Naughty Dog has released since 2007.)
“I felt like I was answering the same questions over and over again,” Straley told Polygon. “We were kind of in this paradigm of this style of game—that I was part of creating! But it felt like I’ve been in this position before. My brain isn’t good with that type of repetition. I need new problems to solve, I need new creative outlets. I’m not saying there wouldn’t be opportunities there, but couple that feeling with the idea that I was working really, really hard at something that wasn’t mine.”
Coven of the Chicken Foot is certainly a significant step away. The first game from Wildflower Interactive, a 16-person team established in 2021, it describes itself as an “emotionally rich, stylized, single-player adventure.” You play as an elderly witch called Gertie, accompanied by a peculiar creature who will learn from Gertie’s actions how to best assist her in their journeys through woods, dungeons and bogs. The claim is that this unnamed beast will be an NPC dynamically shaped by how you play the game.
Elderly women are extraordinarily under-represented in video games, almost always confined to being evil antagonists—the only other example of a playable elderly woman I can think of is in Tale of Tales’ 2008 tiny game The Graveyard (which I loved). Coven looks charming, if a little too close to Ori in its creature design (and vocal sounds for that matter) for my liking. There’s no release date at this point, but you can of course already wishlist the game on Steam.