“The game not only has a lot of influences from Japan, it’s also a message from us Colombians to the world,” Dreams Uncorporated founder and CEO Carlos Andrés Rocha Silva tells me. Cris Tales is an upcoming RPG from Colombia. While it’s heavily inspired by the likes of Final Fantasy 6 and Chrono Trigger, it’s primarily a love letter to the country’s culture, and a testament to what its game dev scene is capable of when given the resources and talent to prosper.
From the moment I step into a call with Silva, his enthusiasm is infectious. His career began with internal applications for companies, working with software used by employees for training exercises and advertisements that were never intended for the public. It was a solitary way to hone his creativity, but allowed him to meet fellow creatives across Colombia and start Dreams Uncorporated. “I was working with a very talented group of people,” Silva tells me. “We didn’t have a lot of experience because there’s not a lot of video game companies here in Colombia, especially back then. We were basically teaching ourselves. There weren’t a lot of YouTube videos so we were going through books and the usual ways of learning things ten years ago. Nowadays people have it a lot easier, it’s more efficient to learn about making games online. But we were happy, and we were very excited about [forming our own company], so we started making games until we decided that we wanted to make something that would represent who we were. And we’re weird.”
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Silva worked on a few smaller games for mobile platforms and consoles while toying with prototypes in the background, and from this experimentation came Cris Tales, although its original form was nothing like the JRPG-inspired project we know today. “A lot of people see Cris Tales and think, ‘Oh my god it’s a JRPG, they’ve always wanted to make a JRPG’ and in a way, yes, but that mechanic was born naked,” Silva explains. “Cris Tales was born out of the idea of seeing the past, present, and future at the same time on the same screen. You have to look at several places at the same time and it’s super strange, but I liked the idea. A lot of different influences came to be and I ended up coming up with this interesting concept, which at the beginning had a lot of difficulties. But later on, we came up with this concept of putting these Disney princesses that were born in Colombia into the game alongside this really weird perspective.”
Colombian culture is everywhere in Cris Tales, although some might not notice due to Western media’s obsession with depicting the nation as a place of drugs, crime, and unrest. The reality is very different, which is why Silva wants to subvert these preconceptions and offer something culturally significant to not only his team, but for players who might be engaging with this part of the world for the very first time.
“The way Crisbell dresses, the architecture in the game, the colours we use, it’s all heavily inspired by Colombia,” Silva says. “By who we are, the way people dress in some cities, the places. St. Clarity, which is a kingdom in the game, is a mixture of a lot of different coastal cities in Colombia. We really wanted to inspire ourselves with real places and try to put that essence into the game both in the mechanics and the visuals. Of course, you also have a cup of coffee that gives you haste.”
There is also an adorable golden frog known as Matias who takes inspiration from local wildlife. While all of these cultural nods are important to Silva, he also wants the media to see Colombia on a level that goes beyond superficiality, acting as both a catalyst for nuanced conversation and a stepping stone for other cultures to enter an industry that has long been satisfied with the status quo.
“It’s definitely not being looked at by the media,” Silva tells me. “So we wanted to say a lot of these things that will tell people we are a lot more than the usual conversations that revolve around Colombia. We’re a magical place, and we really want to show the world who we are and that we have a lot to be proud of.”
Silva brings up the idea of “endemic fantasy” and how he wants to depict relatively normal things found throughout Colombian culture and inject them with a sense of magical realism. One example of this is Caño Cristales, a multicoloured river in the country that is utterly gorgeous to behold. This is recreated in Cris Tales as the Rainbow Lake, a lavish level that echoes the imagery of Colombia’s natural world while transporting it into a place of its own. There’s an element of romanticisation here that Silva is fully aware of, telling me he loves how Japan, US, and the UK are able to turn their cultural icons into things to be admired, and hopes Latin America can do the same in the years to come.
“There are certain topics that come up when you talk about Latin America and when you talk about Colombia, and it’s a bit of a tiresome conversation,” Silva says. “Let’s get over that, let’s show you what we’re about. We’re not trying to put a coat of paint over who we are, it’s kind of the contrary. It’s something we admire from the US or England, cultures that have [spent] centuries working with this type of art and this type of entertainment.”
Silva finds an element of irony in the term “American” and how, technically, he is an American, but Colombian culture is pushed away in favour of something else. “When you say ‘American’, it’s super strange because we’re all Americans,” Silva states. “So it’s a little frustrating that a lot of people know about Dia de los Muertos [Day of the Dead]… and Pixar took this concept and made it so popular worldwide. It tackles this concept in such a mainstream way and I absolutely adored it. So it’s a little bit of a challenge of how do we do that ourselves? Like we know our culture, how do we romanticise it in a more mainstream way?”
It’s a mission with no immediate solution, so the only way forward is for games like Cris Tales to showcase the talent of Colombian developers, and how their culture can go far beyond the cliched depictions seen in shows like Narcos. Silva says that the game development scene in Colombia is growing, with more and more studios popping up on a regular basis, but they still exist on the fringes and are yet to have a hit to call their own. This is partially due to a market obsessed with blockbuster releases and little else, with indie experiences having far less room to succeed unless they’re discussed amongst enthusiasts and developers themselves.
“We hope that we’re also part of this Latin American Renaissance in the video game industry,” Silva says. “It’s about what we want to say to the world – we want to see what we’re capable of doing.”