CLeM Backstage Stories: How our Little Servant Came to Be

Quite some time ago, just before we entered the new millennium, an alternative metal band released an album that, years later, would plant a seed inside Mariona’s head. Mariona is Mango Protocol’s art director, the band was KoRn and the album “Issues”. That album featured a rag doll on its cover art and the music video for one of the singles featured the band performing amidst roaches, a spider and a fly. Later on, a KoRn music video compilation DVD would feature a rudimentary escape room game taking place inside an abandoned asylum.

All these ideas lived in the wild for some time, until 2006 when Mariona started working on the story for a short stop motion movie and found inspiration from one of the bands she was obsessed with at that time. Thus, influenced by KoRn’s “Issues” imagery, the short movie script became a pretty abstract story about the circle of life, revolving around a captive doll chasing bugs while following a little girl’s mysterious instructions.

After finishing the short movie production, its storyboard remained in the shadows waiting for its time to shine again. And this time came in 2018, when Mariona, Javi (Mango Protocol’s narrative director) and I, decided to rescue it and adapt its core concept in what would be the cornerstone on which CLeM, the fourth installment of the Psychotic Adventures game saga, was built.

Javi took on the development of a cute and dark story. His main goal was to embed the original script with themes that resonated better with some very personal experiences in Mariona’s life and, at the same time, make it suitable to be experienced as a fully fledged narrative-based looping puzzle game.

At the same time, Jordi started navigating all the threads in the story to come up with puzzles that represented both a fun challenge to the player and also mirrored the feelings that the main character was discovering as the interactive experience developed.

Meanwhile, in the art direction department, Mariona was about to unveil the appearance of said character. It was a new and improved version of the character from the short movie storyboard which was, in turn, Mariona’s interpretation of the doll in the cover of KoRn’s “Issues”. We all instantly fell in love with “the servant”.

This is one of the most memorable stories behind the development of CLeM and we hope you enjoyed it. Now it’s time for you to play the game and become a part of this amazing puzzlevania. In it, you’ll control a ragdoll that has been brought to life in a dark basement. A voice inside your head will ask you for beauty and your only clue will be a notebook full of entries on alchemy and arthropods and their attributes. Are you ready?

CLeM, coming to Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One on July 17, is an acclaimed puzzle adventure with room escape vibes and a dark story to unveil. Pre-order the game now and get ready to immerse yourself in its creepy and emotional world.