By In the absence of any new Peaky Blinders for the foreseeable future, the closest fans will be able to get is the new Peaky Blinders: Mastermind game that's slated for release later this summer on Xbox One, Playstation 4 and Nintendo Switch.
We'd already been told that it wouldn't be a straightforward TV-to-disappointing-game adaptation in the vein of, say, Little Britain: The Video Game. Mastermind developers FuturLab, based in Hove, have promised something between Professor Layton, LA Noire and real-time tactical stealth puzzler Commandos, and now we've got a bit more info on how it's going to work.
"We’re inspired by choreography and dance, and we’ve had this idea to ‘choreograph’ characters for a long time," FuturLab owner James Marsden told the Hollywood Reporter. "The fact that Peaky Blinders has this great ensemble cast and it’s Tommy managing the tasks of his family without them necessarily knowing why or without the audience knowing why — all paying off at the end of each season — it just seemed to fit perfectly with the mechanic we had."
Basically what you do is control one member of the Peaky gang at a time, and on each level each of them have a single task or puzzle to complete. Inevitably, things will get in the way of your attempts to sort those puzzles, so other characters can be used to help clear the way while they're completing their own tasks.
"At that point you can review your actions on the timeline, ‘rewind’ essentially, and as you’re controlling the second character the actions you took with the first character play back in parallel," says Marsden. There's a lot of time-hopping involved.
Tommy was originally going to have a gun, but instead he'll be able to menace people into doing what he wants.
"Tommy is a master manipulator, so when we had this idea that Tommy just intimidates people, then the player gets to control whom Tommy just intimidated, that felt like a much more natural game mechanic," said Marsden.
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