PAX West 2025: Developer Q&A - War of the Western Deep hopes to reanimate the Don Bluth-esque dichotomy of light and dark

When we were younger, media didn't seem to treat kids quite so shyly. Books went to darker places, movies let us grapple with some of our first notions of loss and consequence in ways that made us ready for the more grown-up stuff, and games introduced us to concepts deeper than we could fully grasp at the time, even when they were wrapped in a silly coating or cushioned by a happy ending. (Of note in my own life: the child soldier-based reality of Final Fantasy 8.)

That spirit hasn't disappeared entirely, but it feels to me that the stories embracing it, especially in animation, are much more fringe today. Somewhere along the way, that balance of light and dark has become less prevalent in mainstream all-ages media, as shareholders discourage showing younger audiences things they "aren't ready for" and cancel the kinds of projects that play with that dichotomy.

Sunsgrove Studios wants to bring some of that back, powered by a push for classic 24 FPS Don Bluth-esque animation and a love for fantasy classics like Redwall. Their game, War of the Western Deep, is the continuation of the mission that started with their ongoing all-ages fantasy webcomic, Beyond the Western Deep, and a compelling adventure game that channels those ideals wholeheartedly.

We got to go hands-on with the demo at PAX West 2025 and had a fulfilling chat with Sunsgrove Studios Founder and Studio Director Alex Kain.

​Just the Facts

Developer: Sunsgrove Studios

Genre: Action-adventure point and click

Release Date: TBA 2027

Hands-on with the War of the Western Deep demo

War of the Western Deep's demo begins with the very sleepy Mirren roused by a royal guard to prepare for a precarious mission. As a royal courier, you've been tasked with going behind enemy lines to deliver a message of utmost importance that has implications for the ongoing conflict between nations. War of the Western Deep is set within the world of the nearly 14-year-old webcomic, Beyond the Western Deep, and while the more expansive lore is there for those seeking it, the game is in its own little corner of the mythos. Mirren and the characters she meets are all original to the game, and the events are happening somewhere in the background of the main narrative.

After Mirren lazily gathers up her gear and is shaken to alertness by the sudden and apparently vital nature of the mission, she sets out for the border. Almost instantly, the mission is struck with an ominous tone-setter. Mirren approaches the border, and where she intends to find canid border guards, she instead finds a wrecked camp and a dead body. A brief inspection, anchored by classic adventure game examining and inventory gathering, leads Mirren to a locked room whose combination can be discovered in the environment.

Using my adventure gaming genius (read: I play a lot of them and like them), I push shrubbery aside and read notes between guards to discover the combination, unlock the door and find that our enemies to the North had been preparing for war. It's a fun, natural, and familiar sequence that leans on classic adventure game sensibilities, with a particular focus on narrative, that brings to mind some of the LucasArts classics I love.

Before the concept of war can settle in Mirren's mind, scuffling aboveground pulls her back outside, where the body has vanished and rustling in the nearby trees indicates that whatever grabbed — and potentially killed — the soldier is still nearby. Just as that thought hits the mind, a giant bug descends from the tree, and War of the Western Deep's second trick reveals itself.

Breaking up the classic adventure game segments are fun combat sequences that are all about managing your stamina, picking your moments to attack, and reading your enemy to deal massive damage. Anchored by detailed animation, these combat sequences are a fun way to introduce some action into a genre more defined by puzzling and storytelling. It's Punch Out-like as you dodge incoming attacks and time your strikes in between your enemy's big moves.

After a stressful battle, Mirren slays the beast and finds herself free to advance properly into the border lands, ending the demo.

This blend of traditional adventure game concept with more active combat makes for a fairly unique experience for adventure game fans of all types — and when it comes equipped with a world as fully realized as Western Deep's, you know you're in for something special.

After our time with the demo, we got to chat with writer of the Beyond the Western Deep comics and Studio Director on the project, Alex Kain. Read on for the conversation!

Q&A with Sunsgrove Studios Founder and Studio Director Alex Kain

Video Games are Good (Julie): To start, can you introduce your name, title, and how you like to describe your game to newcomers?

Alex Kain: Hi, my name is Alex Kain. I am the Studio Director of Sunsgrove Studios. We're working on War of the Western Deep, which is a hand-animated adventure game that is meant to evoke the classics and [put] human-made, 24 FPS animation back on the pedestal again.

VGG (Julie): Love that. It's really cool to see a project go across mediums like this with the series starting as a webcomic nearly 14 years ago. What's been the most exciting thing about exploring that universe in a video game setting?

Alex: We always saw the comics as a world to explore, as a world to dive deep into. And I think that our fans have also always been asking for more of that. They really see this as a place that they want to get to know a little bit more.

And, as a comic creator first, it's always been a little agonizing, the speed at which you have to tell the story. So, the game gave us a great opportunity to find a singular element of the world and really go incredibly deep into it.

Being able to have full voice acting, being able to get to know these characters, being able to understand their relations with the different factions that we talk about in the comic series, it's been a real treat. It's been really exciting to see that come to life in the game.

VGG (Nate): Having spent some time poking at the webcomic after we got this appointment booked, I know the world is both incredibly grounded and richly realized, which kind of stands in counter to the more family-friendly look it has at first glance. How would you describe the tone of the game and what players can expect from the narrative of War of the Western Deep?

Alex: What we're really trying to do with the Western Deep world is to bring back a little bit of that darkness that you saw in not just animated films in the late '70s and the early '80s, but in the books that we were reading as well.

Rachel Bennett, the art director, and I are big fans of the Redwall series, as I'm sure you can tell just by looking at the game, and reading the comic for that matter. We wanted to bring that vibe and aesthetic into games.

There's something that we feel like has been lost in those kinds of stories these days — those kind of darker animated films that challenged their viewers. I feel like you always watched something like The Secret of NIMH or Watership Down a year or two before you probably should have. But really, I think it's just that it was challenging you, and pushing you to a new state of understanding in how you interrogate stories in media and characters. As Don Bluth himself would say, you have to show a little darkness to appreciate the light.

VGG (Nate): It is sad that that mixture of the dark and light doesn't happen as much anymore.

As a kid, reading and watching those things… it always felt like my little secret, right? Like I remember reading one of the Redwall books — I don't remember which one it was, but I remember it was an older character who used a slingshot to brutally destroy his enemies. And it felt like… I wasn't supposed to be reading this. But I got it from the Scholastic Book Fair! Those kinds of stories kind of ushered me down the path that led me here, so I do appreciate the attempt to bring that back.

Alex: Yeah. We think that there is a bridge between those stories and modern fantasy fiction. These days, there isn’t that sort of stepping stone that I think a lot of kids, and adults for that matter, will appreciate this middle path we’re trying to walk.

VGG (Julie): Earlier, we talked about how you were figuring out what art style to make this game in and making that bold choice to approach Don Bluth-esque animation. But I was curious, when it came time to choose the gameplay style, was an adventure game always the natural fit or did you explore other genres to tell the story?

Alex: Whenever we talked about it [early on], we would jokingly talk about things like the Elder Scrolls. We really wanted a big sweeping world to explore. Obviously, the comic series suggests a very large landmass with a lot of different cities and towns and species.

But, we decided to focus into a very narrow sort of area. The game that I kept coming back to was Quest for Glory: Shadows of Darkness, an adventure game that came out in the early '90s that had that sort of open world exploration element to it. But it also had fun characters and puzzles to solve and even a little bit of action.

I really enjoyed that game growing up. It really made me feel like I was getting lost in a strange land, and slowly coming to understand that land and master it. That was the kind of vibe that I wanted in War of the Western Deep; that's the kind of story we wanted to tell. And because we were leaning toward that, the gameplay fell out of that: a 2D adventure game with these really gorgeous hand-drawn backgrounds. There's also this random combat element that shows up in the forest when you're traveling between all these different hub worlds.

It really feels like a perfect match for the world we're creating, and coming up with new and interesting ways to adapt that game concept to a modern audience has been the challenge of the first year or so of development.

VGG (Nate): Obviously, we love the hand-drawn, classically animated approach to game design. We haven't seen it since the Don Bluth-animated classics like Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace. My first question about that: What unique challenges has working with that animation style created for modern game development?

Alex: I mean… there's a reason that no one does it. It's a tremendous pain in the neck. It is really time-consuming. It's expensive. You have to find people who are well-versed in it. And that is nine-tenths of the battle.

For us, it was really just a natural extension of our relationship with Knights of the Light Table. They’re an animation studio out of Austin, Texas, and they're absolutely phenomenal. They absolutely understood the assignment, which was what if Don Bluth did a Redwall movie in the early '80s? What would that have looked like?

Figuring out ways to basically not change their animation, not force it to do things that it doesn't want to do, that's been a design challenge.

For our combat system, for example, a lot of game designers would immediately start thinking about all the cool combos that you could learn, all the fast-paced action. But the 24 FPS animation is really deliberate and methodical. And if you animation cancel, for example, it really doesn't look right. That was a big part of designing the combat system. Instead of making it bend to our will, we let the animation make the decisions for us.

And that meant, okay, what's a combat system with no animation canceling look like? How do we make it feel more deliberate and methodical? How do we make it more of a puzzle for people who maybe aren't into action games, but really like adventure games? It really has just been about using the animation as a guiding light to figure out the game design.

VGG (Nate): The way you've built it, it does make you appreciate the art even more. In the combat, you're looking for those visual tells, right? And so you’re really taking in the visuals as you do that.

You've mentioned Don Bluth and some of your other inspirations, but what are some of the overall aesthetic inspirations of the game — and the world of Western Deep on the whole?

Alex: We talked about Redwall a lot. I think that’s really important. Watership Down, any of those sort of darker animated films that we grew up with that really had an effect on us when we were growing up.

Don Bluth's films and really the entire ethos of him leaving Disney with a bunch of animators and making Banjo and the Woodpile Cat in, basically, a garage. Following their passion like that really speaks to the art and the craft of animation — doing what you think needs to be seen.

And we don't think that anyone really personifies that as much as someone like Don Bluth, who gave up a dream job and could have been one of the replacements for the Nine Old Men, but instead went off to do his own thing. Obviously, he's been challenged because of it, but we look at that as just the journey of animation.

So, you know, it feels like we've dug up this ancient old technique for this game, but really, I think this is just the next step in helping to bring it back into the public light.

VGG (Nate): When we stopped by the other day, we talked briefly about how excited we were to hear Edwyn Tiong’s familiar voice in the trailers, and you’ve got veterans from all across the games industry. It must be exciting to finally hear this world come to life. How's the process been working with your voice cast, and what about the performances excites you the most at this point in development?

Alex: All of them have brought their A game. Edwyn Tiong has obviously been absolutely phenomenal. I worked with him on Dust: An Elysian Tale back in the day.

Samantha Béart has been an absolute champion of the game. The work that they've done has really brought the character of Mirren to life. Just seeing the reactions that people have had to some of the lines of dialogue that she has here has been just such a treat.

And of course, Reece Bridger, the latest addition to the cast, he's playing the King's Guard: our sort of stuffy, middle of the night, wishes that he was still in bed, servant to the King.

We're still bolstering out the voice cast, and all of these actors are bringing something different to the table — and that's something that we love the most, is that they understand the assignment.

That really is key. We're making something very specific here, trying to hit a very specific vibe. And they get it. It's not a Saturday morning cartoon. It's not Lord of the Rings. It is its own thing. These things exist on their own plane, and it's been great to see that come to light.

As you also mentioned, hearing these characters that are speaking in similar dialects to characters from the comics is fascinating for us as well. Hearing some of the names and proper nouns from the world has also been fascinating.

VGG (Nate): I appreciate through all these different parts of the game, you really are emphasizing the humans that are making it. That's so appreciated in a world where there's too many people throwing their hands up and saying, ‘ah, it's inevitable. We gotta figure out how to work with AI.’ And I’m just here screaming no! Things like this thrive because of the human touch, and that comes through in the voice actors, in the animation.

Alex: Of course. Like you said, I think a lot of people see the ever-present march of AI and its integration into every facet of our lives as inevitable.

It very well may be, but this is a style of animation that thrives on the human craft. It is something that is born from pure human sweat, and grit, and talent, and work. You can't fake it. You can't cut corners with it. Larger companies than us have tried, and it changed the entire animation industry in the nineties and the early aughts.

That's a path that the industry's already traveled. Bringing this style back to showcase — it’s us saying something needs to look different today. This is something that looks different from everything else that you've seen. And it's because it’s hard to make, you know? It is difficult.

Things used to look like this everywhere. You used to be able to turn on the TV and see stuff like this all the time, and you can't anymore. Because the world moved on.

We still think that there's something special there, and we want to bring it back and show it to everyone and say, ‘Hey, this is what things used to look like. If you like it, maybe watch some of the classics.’

VGG (Julie): I think it really shows. That's what makes it so eye-catching. Every time you walk by, you feel that human touch and the effort that went into crafting this. Is there anything else before we wrap up that you'd like to share about the game or team behind it?

Alex: Our team is absolutely amazing.

Nolan Markey, our composer, is absolutely bringing the fire, understanding that this kind of animation is not just the art, it is the whole package. So, him doing what he does, along with Lucas Fehring, our Audio Director, really helped solidify the experience. Things need to sound a certain way to help you feel a certain way.

Rachel Bennett's art guides the whole experience. And of course, Mike Smith is our Technical Director helping us to bend Unity to our will.

The demo that we have here on the show floor is going to be available for Steam Next Fest. We're really excited about that. We want people to be able to give it a try and let us know what they think. The game itself is still several years away. We're saying mid-to-late 2027 right now. All that animation takes time to make, after all. We're in it for the long haul.

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Thanks for reading our coverage direct from the PAX West show floor. If you found it interesting and want to read more hands-on game previews and interviews with developers, visit our PAX West articles. Or check out our recap stream for a behind-the-scenes on what we did, played, and saw during all four days of PAX.