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(…) In the past, Ros had created board games for himself and his friends, and he had been noodling over an idea based on the word “drafting” as a double entendre — referring both to the drafting of cards in a game like Magic: The Gathering and the drafting of architectural blueprints.

What emerged was a prototype for a game in which the player would continually draft new rooms from a randomly generated selection, sort of like drawing cards from a deck. He was also inspired by a board game called Labyrinth and the esoteric puzzle book Maze, published in 1985 by Christopher Manson, which has never quite been solved.

From there, Ros began filling the manor with puzzles and mysteries, trying to build a world in which knowledge was the key to making progress. “I wanted it to feel like Zelda,” he said. “You’ll find information in very disparate places, and you don’t need all of those pieces of information to progress.”

He tried to avoid playing similar “metroidbrainia”-style games, such as Outer Wilds or Return of the Obra Dinn at one point, he did accidentally play through the action-role-playing game Tunic before realizing that it shared the same traits. (…)