CLeM Backstage Stories: From a 19th century house to a Puzzlevania environment

In our previous Wire post, we gave some insight into the origin of our game’s story and player character CLEM. Now we want to share with you some ideas that influenced the design of one of the most important characters in the game: the house.

Here at Mango Protocol, we pride ourselves on our ability to look at the real world and extract wonder, mystery, and fun from our sometimes worn and mundane surroundings. As such, we look to the things around us and have been incorporating plenty of these concepts into our games since the studio’s inception.

In the development CLEMwe all agreed that we needed to find the perfect escape room-like environment for our game. Luckily, we had access to the Torre Elias, an incredibly beautiful traditional Catalan house from the 19th century, which is also Mariona’s ancestral home! You wouldn’t turn down unrestricted access to a listed building, would you? Well, neither would we.

Here is the facade on the main street, which you can see while walking around CLEM‘s home garden.

The house has been lived in since it was built. Each generation has managed to leave their mark by adapting or remodeling parts of the house to bring it up to modern living standards. This really helped us create that “empty but not really abandoned” look. CLEM‘s house. We wanted you to explore the different rooms and halls and get the feel of a place that not so long ago was full of life and provided a beautiful home for a family.

The Torre Elias kitchen is a beautiful example of furniture that looks old by today’s standards, but is definitely modern compared to a 19th century kitchen.

In the previous picture you can see how Mariona adapted this mix of old and older furniture to the game.

Of course, if you inherit an old architectural gem of a house, you can make some changes to make it habitable, but there are some things that stand the test of time with flying colors and that you’ll want to keep at home at all costs. A few examples of this are, on the one hand, the wonderful hydraulic tiles and murals reminiscent of wallpaper, both beautiful staples of Catalan modernism that Mariona was able to perfectly translate into the style of the game.

And on the other hand, there are the little items that bring the personal taste of each resident into the home. Check out these wrought iron sconces that lit up a corridor in the game along with these patterned wall decorations and even more hydraulic tiles. It turns out that these dimly lit corridors and color tones perfectly matched the mood we wanted for the least modernized rooms in CLEM‘s house.

Speaking of small objects, Mariona has selected some decorative and artistic objects to fill the house with flair and personality. I have incorporated some of these into puzzles so that you can connect on some level with the characters who lived in this house and coexisted with these particular objects. This Bristol glass jar will be given to you in the first stages of the CLEM. It is one of those objects that helps create a coherent environment while also being relevant to the development of gameplay.

Finally, I would like to emphasize the importance of the artwork that you can find around the house. Mariona has taken the trouble to CLEMs house walls with works by some iconic female artists. These images also served as inspiration for some of the puzzles.

Take a tour of the house and enjoy tributes to paintings such as “The Pond at Charleston” by Vanessa Bell, “Plante grasse et fiole” by Tamara de Lempicka or “Pianist” by cubist artist Maria Blanchard, which served as inspiration for one piece of a musical puzzle in the game.

I hope you enjoyed this tour of the real-life influences that helped build our beloved home. You can explore it right now because CLEMour acclaimed puzzle adventure with an escape room atmosphere and a dark story, is now available for Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One.