THE MAGNIFICENT TRUFFLE PIGS

Detectorists meets Firewatch? We dig it

Developer Thunkd

Publisher AMC Games

Format PC

Origin UK

Release Early summer

Ah, the great outdoors. How we’ve missed you. The debut game from Thunkd, a micro-studio founded by The Chinese Room alumnus Andrew Crawshaw, presents the English countryside at its most idyllic just as we’re most susceptible to its bucolic appeal. Yes, we might be spending plenty of time digging around in the mud, pulling out our trowel to excavate a range of treasures buried within acres of sprawling farmland, but as we sweep our metal detector across the ground, we’re able to turn our gaze to summery blue skies and lush green fields, luxuriating in a vision of our homeland we can enjoy for once.

As a nation obsessed with the past – often to our detriment – metal-detecting feels like a quintessentially English pastime. Yet while it’s the mechanical focus of The Magnificent Trufflepigs, Crawshaw didn’t simply want to tell a story about what you dig up. “There was going to be this whole backstory about things that had gone on on the site of this farm,” he tells us. “But there’s a lot of story games where it’s all about finding things in the past.” Instead, he decided to focus on the two central characters: Beth, played by Luci Fish, who cajoles Adam (Doctor Who’s Arthur Darvill) into helping her out on a mission to recover a lost earring before the land is converted to a solar farm.