In a recent interview with Famitsu magazine (as translated by Gematsu,) Fumito Ueda, creator of such games as ICO, Shadow of the Colossus, and The Last Guardian, spoke a bit about his latest project. According to him, prototyping for the game is well underway.

Back at the beginning of 2018, we got what is likely a teaser for this new project. Underneath a Happy New Year message on the (Japanese) site, visitors saw the image seen above: a boy or girl sitting on a stone altar radiating a beam of light, with a giant, chubby hand off to the right. The website’s source code called the picture “Beauty and the Beast 2018.”

Almost a year later, he spoke to Famitsu about his project. Details are still light, but it appears that prototyping has begun:

We’re in a stage of various trials. This stage we’re in, where we’re actually making our ideas to test if they’re interesting or not, is being supported by Kowloon Nights (a game fund), so we’re proceeding with prototyping. We’re working out the core parts first, and from there we’ll make it into a stable product. That’s our challenge this time.

Ueda told Famitsu that the new game will be a completely new game and not a sequel to his previous works. Take that claim with a grain of salt, though; despite being stand-alone games, some of his previous works had story links to each other, such as Shadow of the Colossus being an indirect prequel to ICO.

When asked about the scope of the project, Ueda said:

What we’re making now doesn’t feel like an indie game. We’re ultimately aiming for something on the scale of Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and The Last Guardian. If larger-scale development becomes of interest to us, then I think we will significantly expand our development system and take it to a large-scale development team to make it a big game.

Few other details are known about this project, including when it will be finished.