CLeM Backstage Stories: From a 19th Century House to a Puzzlevania Environment

In our previous Wire post we shared some insights on the origin of the story and the player character of our game CLeM. Now we’d like to share some ideas that influenced the design of one of the most important characters in the game: the house.

Here at Mango Protocol we pride ourselves in the ability to look at the real world and extract wonder, mystery and fun from our sometimes worn and mundane surroundings. Thus, we’ve been turning our gaze to the things around us and injecting tons of these concepts into our games since the inception of the studio.

When developing CLeM, we all agreed that we had to find the perfect environment for our game with escape room vibes to take place in. Luckily, we had access to Torre Elias, which, besides being a hauntingly beautiful 19th century traditional Catalan house, is Mariona’s ancestral home! You would not reject having total access to a protected architectural heritage building, right? Well, neither did we.

Here’s the main street facade, the one that you can see when walking around CLeM’s house garden.

The house has been inhabited since it was built. Every generation has managed to leave their mark by adapting or rebuilding parts of the house to keep it up to modern living standards. That really helped us to bring that “empty but not really abandoned” look to CLeM’s house. We wanted you to explore the different rooms and halls and have that feeling of a place that, not so long ago, was full of life and provided a nice home for a family.

Torre Elias kitchen is a nice example of furniture that looks old for today’s standards but is definitely modern in contrast to how an 1800s kitchen might have been.

In that previous picture you can see how Mariona adapted that mix of old and older furniture to the game.

Of course, when you inherit an ancient architectural jewel of a home, you may introduce some changes to make it liveable, but there’s some things that pass the test of time with flying colors and you want to keep at home at all costs. A couple examples of this are, on one side, the marvelous hydraulic tiles and wall paintings resembling wallpaper, both beautiful staples of Catalan Modernism which Mariona managed to translate perfectly into the game’s style.

And, on the other side, there’s the small items, those that bring the personal taste of each inhabitant to the house. Look at these forged iron wall lamps that ended up lighting an in-game corridor along with these pattern wall decorations and even more hydraulic tiling. Turns out these low light corridors and tones were a perfect fit for the mood we wanted for the least modernized rooms in CLeM’s house.

Speaking of small items, Mariona picked some decorative and artistic objects to fill the house with flair and personality. Some of them I managed to incorporate into puzzles, letting you connect at some level with the characters that lived in that house and coexisted with these particular items. This Bristol glass jar will surely catch your eye in the first stages of CLeM. It is one of these objects that helps bringing a cohesive environment and at the same time end up being relevant to the development of the gameplay.

Finally, I’d like to stress the importance of the works of art that you’ll be able to find around the house. Mariona made the effort of filling CLeM’s house walls with some iconic female artists’ works. These pictures also helped to inspire some of the puzzles.

Have a tour around the house and enjoy homages of paintings like Vanessa Bell’s “The Pond at Charleston”, Tamara de Lempicka’s “Plante grasse et fiole” or “Pianist” by cubist artist Maria Blanchard, which inspired part of a musical puzzle in the game.

I hope you enjoyed this walkthrough along the real-world influences that helped build our beloved house. You can explore it right now, as CLeM, our acclaimed puzzle adventure with escape room vibes and a dark story to unveil, is out now on Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One.