#EVNDevWeek Day 1 – Atelier Sentô

This week, MangaGamer is celebrating EVN Developer Week! Throughout the week, the company will be releasing titles from English developers and have encouraged the community at large to promote their own favorite devs. And when it comes to trumpeting this kind of thing, you usually don’t have to tell me twice. The only question is how…as I’m not exactly shy about trumpeting my favorite developers to the world at large. Most of them you can read right here, but there are some developers whose work I enjoyed that I really don’t talk about. And it is high time that changed.

So, this week we’ll be highlighting EVN developers that I haven’t talked about much that I really enjoy. We won’t be going too deep into their work in this forum. It’ll just be a brief spotlight to hopefully bring your attention to some talented devs. So, let’s get started in one of my favorite development scenes right now: Europe. The European development scene has one of the highest talent pedigrees of any gaming development scene on Earth right now…yes I said it. Moacube, We Are Muesli, Broken Rules and Nova-Box alone have produced work that demands your attention if you enjoy both great art and innovative fiction. Today, though we’re going to talk about a young French studio that have produced some incredible pieces of work: Atelier Sentô.

Atelier Sentô has only been active for a few years now, but the group is noted for having been inspired by their travels through rural Japan as well as Japanese mythology and a heavy dusting of Hayao Miyazaki influence as well. This has melded into a watercolor style that makes an project from them immediately stand out both as an overall style and in the gaming world. In their short time as a creative team, Atelier Sentô was recognized with a Silver Award during the Eleventh International MANGA Award held by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the comic Onibi.  On the gaming front, their work has caught my eye only recently. I am really enjoying Yurei Station right now and there are several other titles they have worked on in art classes and volunteer groups on their Itch.Io.

Hopefully everything goes well for the group as they move forward to their big project The Coral Cave. For now, if this is your first time hearing about the group I strongly suggest you go to their website here and check out their work yourself. You can also see a video below of their artistic style as the group works on a commission of a book cover about Miyazaki. JP3: OUT.