The Department Interview

The game has been thoroughly researched, both in the traditional sense and through lived experience. Our Game Director, Osian Williams, served five years with the South Wales Police, and his background informs every aspect of the game. That influence is most obvious in the aesthetics and the jargon our characters use, which we’re keeping as true-to-life as possible. Of course, everything we draw on must be in the public domain for legal reasons, but we continue to collaborate with the service within the bounds of our agreements to ensure players experience as much authenticity as possible.

The game is structured around individual cases, each a self‑contained story following the investigation of a single crime. While there is an overarching plot that ties these cases together, the story can largely be experienced in “episodes.” We believe this format lends itself well to Early Access, should we decide to pursue that route. It would allow us to refine and polish how we deliver these episodes before committing to the full release.

Crime drama is a well‑explored genre across every medium, and there are countless examples to draw from. Our narrative lead, Connor Simmons, is a big fan of Raymond Chandler’s novels and modern neo‑noir films like Chinatown, Se7en, and Drive. But the biggest influence on The Department is definitely television. The past decade has seen a wave of outstanding UK detective noir series — Hinterland, Broadchurch, The Killing, Luther, Department Q — not to mention the wealth of brilliant work coming from the US and Europe. It’s a fantastic time to be into detective fiction, and the influences we can draw on are too numerous to list.

One thing that might surprise people is just how much work has gone into the world‑building. We’re setting the game in a fictional Welsh post‑industrial town. We chose not to use a real location because, as a crime game, the plot requires the city to become a morally corrupt dystopia, and we weren’t comfortable casting that kind of shadow over an actual place. So Port Hearn was born.

But when you create a new city, especially in a game where players are encouraged to obsess over details, you have to be able to answer all sorts of questions about it. How did the city get this way? Who are the key players behind its fall from grace? What went wrong, and when? The more questions you ask, the more details you need to fill in.

We’re really looking forward to sharing more about the world of The Department in due course, and we think players will be excited to see just how much there is to uncover.

We’re dealing with fairly heavy subject matter, so balancing the tone to ensure the game doesn’t become an emotional slog is an ongoing priority. Fortunately, we’re British, gallows humour is practically a second language.

Sometimes that humour appears as subtle background or environmental gags; other times it comes through in sarcastic reminders from the protagonist’s partner or other NPCs. In real life, police officers and first responders often develop a sharp sense of humour as a way of protecting themselves from the stresses of an intense job. We like to think we’re honouring that tradition by injecting a few laughs into the experience wherever we can.

Most of our senior team comes from a television background, so adapting to the production processes and requirements of an entirely new medium has been an ongoing learning experience. We’re used to delivering creative projects at scale, but the gulf between video production and video game development is often vast.

Fortunately, we have a fantastic team around us who know this space inside out. They’ve been instrumental in bringing us up to speed and ensuring we don’t approach the project with unrealistic expectations. So far, fingers crossed, things are going better than we anticipated.

We acknowledged early on that we don’t have the budget for thrills to come from adrenaline. That means we can’t lean on car chases or shootouts to engage players. Instead, our focus has been on two core pillars: immersion and challenge.

Immersion: The world needs to feel real and lived‑in, drawing players in and inviting them to explore. Every case and every scene is designed with hidden details that reward those who take the time to look deeper.

Challenge: The cases are deliberately difficult to solve. Players who go the extra mile and immerse themselves in the world will uncover clues others miss, and they’ll use that knowledge to ask sharper questions in interrogations. When a case concludes, success won’t feel handed to them, it will feel earned, and that sense of accomplishment is central to the game’s design philosophy.

As a Welsh studio, bringing Welsh culture to the forefront of the game is a top priority. Wales has a wealth of storytelling potential, and we’re keen to see it showcased in video games.

The inclusion of the Welsh language did introduce some challenges. As a Welsh‑speaking team, our first instinct was to make the game entirely in Welsh. However, that quickly became a budgetary concern. Statistically, most people are not Welsh. A shame, yes, but a reality we had to acknowledge. If we didn’t make allowances for those audiences, the game risked losing wider appeal.

What we eventually realised is that this limitation could become a creative opportunity. We want to showcase the Welsh language and culture, so we chose a protagonist who is not Welsh - a newcomer, a stranger in a strange land. They don’t speak the language and don’t know the culture, which introduces tension early on. As the character gradually becomes more settled, the audience is introduced to more and more of the culture alongside them.

The cases themselves serve as grand puzzles, requiring players to apply deductive reasoning to work through complex investigations.

Moment to moment, we’ve also introduced smaller challenges to keep the gameplay varied. In real life, forensics is a lengthy and highly scientific process, but we’ve chosen to abstract this essential part of a modern detective’s toolkit. This allows us to break up the flow with forensics minigames that provide a change of pace while giving players the chance to uncover crucial evidence. Of course, just as in real life, forensics can go wrong - failing these minigames will deny players access to that information, raising the stakes and reinforcing the importance of careful investigation.

There will be branching narratives to a point. We track how players perform in each case — how much relevant evidence they uncover, how they handle interviews, how well they do in the forensics minigames — along with a range of other factors that are tallied up at the end of each investigation.

Each case has three potential endings, determined by whether the player accuses the correct suspect and whether they’ve gathered enough evidence to make that accusation stick.

The game’s protagonist is in a fragile mental state, driven by something of a vendetta. While we don’t have the scope for one case’s outcome to directly cascade into another, we do reflect the player’s performance in subtle ways. Their successes and failures will influence the protagonist’s sanity, revealed through clues about his life outside of work and how well (or not well) he’s coping.

We hope this approach strikes a balance: giving players a genuine sense of agency and immersion in the narrative, while keeping the overall scope attainable and focused.