Hi, I’m Steven ter Heide, Creative Director at Wild Sheep Studio working on the cozy animal-adventure game, Adorable Adventures.
In Adorable Adventures, we set out with a simple intention: to create a cozy exploration game that captures the feeling we have when wandering through nature: relaxed, curious, and wonderfully distracted.
We realized that to achieve that feeling, the story needed to be grounded in a perspective that naturally encourages slow, playful exploration. That led us to Boris, a young boar who finds himself separated from his family after a forest fire. Everyone is safe, just scattered across the park and the fire is only part of the backstory. The adventure that follows is gentle and carefree.
This setup gave us a clear structure for the main quest: helping Boris find his siblings and bringing the family back together. But from a design standpoint, we didn’t want this to become a traditional objective‑driven quest. It is not about urgency or danger. It is about being Boris.
Boris is still young, and the world is full of smells he does not recognize yet. Following scents becomes its own kind of exploration, a way of navigating that should feel playful and instinctive. Sometimes the scent of a sibling is hidden behind a stronger smell he needs to learn before he can follow his nose and find his way.
His biggest challenge is not the environment. It is staying focused long enough to follow that nose. And honestly, he does not always succeed. Sometimes he wanders off. Sometimes he plays. Sometimes he just sits. The park itself encourages that. Each biome has its own personality, its own distractions, and its own little surprises.
We have filled the park with small interactions and details that reward curiosity, so wandering off the path often leads to its own little discoveries. This was important to us: exploration should feel self‑directed, not prescribed. And while the main quest is about finding family, the game never pushes you toward it. You are free to explore at your own pace, to follow whatever catches your attention. There is no right order to things. But as you grow your little group, the world opens up, giving you new places to reach when you feel ready to explore more.
To help guide the experience without breaking that feeling, we introduced the Forest Guard. He is the narrator of the adventure, but more as an observer than a storyteller. He knows the park well, he is particularly fond of Boris, and he understands the ways of the boars.
He does not tell Boris what to do, and he does not interrupt your exploration. Instead, he bridges the gap between our human understanding of trails and maps, and Boris’s world of scents and instincts. This lets Boris stay a real animal: curious, playful, and occasionally stubborn, while still giving you an anchor for the story and helpful observations along the way. His role is simply to share insights about what you are already doing, or what you just did.
As you find each sibling, the family grows, and so does your ability to explore. Some areas can only be reached when you work together, and each sibling brings their own little quirks to the group. They are happy to follow Boris’s lead, and we hope they make the world feel more alive and more connected. That each reunion feels like progress, not because the game tells you so, but because the family feels more complete.
That is the heart of the story we want to tell: a gentle adventure about growing up, learning the world, and finding your way back to the ones you love. Not through dramatic twists or high stakes, but through small discoveries and quiet moments.
In the end, Boris does not become a hero in the traditional sense. He stays a young boar. But he learns what it means to be one: how to navigate the world, how to trust his instincts, and how to help others.
And along the way, we hope you feel a bit of what inspired us: that peaceful, carefree joy of being outdoors, where it is okay to slow down, take your time, and let your curiosity guide you.
That is the adventure we wanted to create, the story we wanted to tell, and we are excited to share it with you. Adorable Adventures launches today on Xbox Series X|S and we hope you will check it out.
Adorable Adventures
PQube Limited
$19.99
$15.99
Across rolling meadows, sun-dappled forest paths, deep caves, and rocky highlands, identify scents and follow trails to learn more about the world around you. Search for your brothers and sisters, uncover secrets, and expand your library of smells against the backdrop of a gentle and heart-warming story.
The post How we Built a Quest Around Curiosity in Adorable Adventures appeared first on Xbox Wire.
