For starters, Dinh always wanted to make a game that was played from the inside of a computer or in the virtual world, a desire that stems from the dev’s favorite movies and books as a kid. The influence of Tron is obvious, with all the glowing particles and the way the world is built, but there are more sources of inspiration that played a part in how Recompile came to be and why it was designed to be a story with two sides to it, and also multiple endings. A very interesting detail about the story of the game is that the events of Recompile take place in one second of real-life time, as the virus - the main character, hero of the story - tries to hack into a system, but in the ‘outside world’ this is humanity’s last stand to save itself from extinction.
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What Inspired Recompile
Dinh always wanted the game to have gated progression and to be more in line with the Metroidvania genre, but as the developer found himself playing more open-world games, he saw the potential in making Recompile a balanced mix of the two. This is far from easy to achieve, as one of the selling points for games the caliber of Breath of the Wild is that players can do whatever they want in the world because it’s at their disposal, and yet even Zelda games are no strangers to locking progression behind story advancements. In the words of Dinh:
As for The Matrix, while the obvious inspiration may seem the franchise’s setting, what truly stood out the most to Phigames when making Recompile was how rich and powerful its visual effects are. This translates into the game featuring incredible explosions that look different every time, and that’s because they are not selected from a few animations available, but rather things are made up of lots of smaller bits that have physics and bounce off the floor. Even the ground ripples as the hero of the story crash-lands on it, and this plays very well in terms of haptic and visual feedback.
The sci-fi elements are also very strong in Recompile, and Dinh found a source of inspiration in the work of Iain Banks, specifically The Culture series. These stories explore the symbiotic relationship between sentient artificial intelligences and humanoids, as they colonize space together and form a special bond. This is very different from other AI-related media, like Terminator, where instead the AI kills the humans and hunts them down. Thus, Recompile became an existential game that combines satisfying aesthetics with fun gameplay and deep questions about the future of the human race and technology itself.
Recompile is available now on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.
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