Bend time to relive life’s ups and downs in gorgeous adventure Arise: A Simple Story

Arise: A Simple Story is a game filled with feelings of love and loss that we believe is truly special. With our hearts poured into it, it’s not just our debut as a studio – most importantly it’s our dream coming to life. We want to take you on this one-of-a-kind journey that will bring back memories of your own life, both happy and sad, but all being a part of your story.

A rollercoaster of emotions

Your adventure in Arise starts where many might usually end – on a funeral pyre. You wake up in limbo, where a mysterious light beckons you from atop of a snowy mountain. Your trek towards it turns into a bittersweet journey through your life, where you relive the moments of happiness but also have to face devastating tragedies all over again. If that’s not extraordinary enough, you quickly realise you have the gift of bending time to your will.

 
One of our goals with Arise was to make this odyssey memorable and constantly surprising. We turned our hero’s rich life experience into beautiful landscapes that will shift along with your emotional state, as you roam through varied environments that reflect the current tone of the narrative. As the story unfolds, your power to manipulate time also transforms to fit the moments you’re reliving.
In Arise you never know what’s around the corner. You enjoy the good times to the fullest knowing they might not last, and endure the hardships working to turn them around. To put it simply – that’s just life, right? Beautiful and scary at the same time. That feeling of not knowing what comes next and playing with the cards you were dealt is one of the major themes in Arise.

A deeply personal story

Have you ever taken a long, hard look at your life and had doubts about some pieces of the puzzle? Is this who you want to be? Is this what you want to reminisce on 30 years from now? We did just that and decided we needed to take a leap of faith and reclaim the spark we’ve lost somewhere along the way. Next thing we know, we’re quitting our jobs. That’s how a small company we named Piccolo Studio was born, and Arise with it.

 
Us reflecting on our lives directly inspired our game and it’s only natural that it deals with self-reflection. This is a deeply personal project for us, a part of our own journey as we pursue our dream. The story we tell in Arise is important to us and the fact that we have years of various life experiences (not unlike your own, I imagine) helped a ton. We drew from them to tell a story that we hope will strike a chord with you. We genuinely can’t wait for you to play through it.