The Stranger Things season 3 video game will expand on the show
By Dan Selcke
After Game of Thrones season 8 premieres on April 14, the next big TV reveal will come on July 4, when Stranger Things season 3 drops onto Netflix in its entirety. It’ll be accompanied by Stranger Things 3: The Game, which will mirror the story exactly, with a little extra. “We have the events of Season 3 and can play that the way you want,” said game director Dave Pottinger, talking to Variety. “Then we’ve added sidequests, optional content for people who want a longer experience, but also for fans. So for people who watch the show and play the game, it will be more than just playing through the show.”
As you can see below, the developers are going for a retro aesthetic befitting of the show’s ’80s setting…although technically things were 8-bit back then, not 16-bit, but you get the idea.
The game was inspired by stuff like The Legend of Zelda, Streets of Rage, and the old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games, for all the old people in the room. “It’s a little bit of an ’80s-grab bag, but modernized for today,” Pottinger said.
"We all brought in our old consoles and were playing games for inspiration, so there is a bit of an homage from those. It’s important for us to echo the vibe of the show, which is friendship over fear, so we designed it from the ground-up for cooperative play. We want to invoke that feeling of sitting down on a couch and playing those old games together."
In the end, the game will feature a dozen playable characters (“It’s the characters you would expect, plus some Season 3 surprises.”), but there only two available when Variety sampled the demo: Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) and Sheriff Jim Hopper (David Harbour). In the sample level, which apparently was made just for the demo to avoid giving anything away, the pair were wandering around a lab fighting bad guys in sunglasses, each with their special attacks (a shoulder rush for Hopper and a spinning stun move for Joyce). Sounds pretty ’80s arcade to me.
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Pottinger estimates the game will take between 12 and 15 hours to complete. It comes out for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Mac and PC on July 4.
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