Ask any adventure fan what the name "Kheops" means to them. If all that comes to mind is a pyramid-building pharaoh, they probably just don't realize that it's also the name responsible for the recent games that made Jules Verne, the Renaissance and cracking safes fun again.

When Return to Mysterious Island came out a couple of years ago, it impressed players by spinning something new and remarkably fresh out of a familiar formula and a point-and-click interface. Since then, the small French team of developers behind it have released several more games, all of them warmly received. So why isn't Kheops Studio a household name among adventure fans?

Kheops' story is an interesting one. The dozen people who make up the team were all Cryo employees, until DreamCatcher bought the company and then decided not to continue any in-house development. The game they were working on at the time, The Egyptian Prophecy, seemed destined for cancellation, but they decided to form their own company and finish it instead.

With its limited staff, Kheops has chosen to focus on design and integration. Their tools allow them to build a game's story, world and puzzles, to create the artistic style, and then outsource the graphics (created by a company called Mzone), music and voice work, before putting it all together and making sure the game receives the amount of polish it deserves. In some cases, even the design is done by another company, as was the case with ECHO and The Secrets of Da Vinci, which were designed by the two-person Totm Studio (also former Cryo people).

Still only three years old, Kheops already has seven games to its credit and is now putting the finishing touches on its new game, Destination: Treasure Island. Despite such a hectic schedule and the pressure of the upcoming release, the team recently took some time to welcome me to their office, and their CEO, Benoît Hozjan, answered my questions about what constitutes the Kheops touch, and what the future holds for them.

I'm really glad to meet you, especially since we don't know all that much about Kheops Studio. Despite having made several very good games, you don't seem to get as much exposure as some other companies or designers.

We have a growing fan-base, but it's true that we keep somewhat low-profile. We try not to build too much expectation around our games and risk disappointing players in the end. I'm also not in favour of having a single "star" representing the studio. Even though the game designer obviously plays an important part, we're a team first and foremost, where everyone tries to do his best. And at both ends of the development process, we all give ideas to him to shape the game or finalise the gameplay — and he really appreciates that collective brainstorming and feedback. It's also more motivating for everyone to feel like an integral part in the success of a product, rather than just an underling working under a big name. And I think that translates in the amount of polish our games receive.

But still, tell me a bit more about you. What sort of games do you play?

When I was working for Cryo, I was in the tech department, and while I had played some of the classics, I didn't play many adventure games then — I was more of a console gamer. Of course, this has changed since Kheops Studio was founded, and I've had the chance to discover many different things. Developers are not the biggest gamers (once they start developing), but we all try to play the adventures that are currently released, or at least the demos, to see what is being done elsewhere.

You have to work with rather limited budgets. How does that translate in the development process?

Having to work with limited budgets is a constraint, but we try to treat it as a stimulating challenge. After all, do you need a high budget to have good ideas? To use a film analogy, we're not a Hollywood company, but rather the sort of indie studio you'd see at Sundance festival, with movies relying on creativity rather than special effects. Still, budgets affect many things. For instance, we have to make a game within 8 or 9 months, from original design to going gold, with two or three games in different state of advancement being developed at the same time.

Most people are pleased with your games once they've played them, but some are not willing to try them, possibly because of the bad image of node-based games. As former Cryo employees, you must know that it's a company that didn't end its life with a very good image.

I think that when the first node-based Cryo games (Versailles, Egypt 1156 B.C.) came out, they made a good impression. But I'm not sure there were only high-quality projects afterwards, and that may have given a bad reputation to that type of game. Even now, both gamers and reviewers tend to be prejudiced against these, and it's difficult to fight against that. Yet Return to Mysterious Island surprised many people, and its success owes much to word of mouth.

At the moment, the gaming industry is very much focused on real-time 3D, being able to move freely, but it should not be forgotten that there is more than one sort of audience. I'm a Quake fan personally, but I wouldn't make my parents play it. Many people consider point-and-click dated, but it's a control scheme that has a much easier learning curve, and allows players to immediately focus on the game, rather than having to master the controls first.

We know many people among our friends and family who don't know much about video games, but when we made them play our games, they got into them in a matter of minutes, and absolutely didn't mind not being able to explore behind every tree — and didn't know the difference between real-time and pre-rendered 3D.

So we're not trying to go for the latest technology. We're doing point-and-click and nodes, and we're trying to do it well, to push the envelope in terms of graphics, story and overall experience. We just want people to give our games a chance and not judge them on technological criteria.

Article continues on the next page...