For more than two decades, CULT OF LUNA has forged a sound that has grown incomparable to that of others. Ambitious, epic, visceral, drenched in emotion, and long regarded as one of Sweden’s premiere metal acts, CULT OF LUNA has a storied career with nine studio albums to their name, countless tours spanning the globe, and a win for “Best Metal Band of the Year” in Sweden, the band returned in 2022 with ‘The Long Road North’. Now, they’re releasing an interactive gaming experience for the music video “Cold Burn”.
Instead of a traditional music video, CULT OF LUNA creates an immersive audiovisual experience in collaboration with creative agency North Kingdom / NoA, where innovation and storytelling stand at their core.
The player’s mission is to help a “lost light” to escape the darkness, and to find its way home through a dystopian maze. The player can also gather other lights and bring them to The Mother Light, at the center of the maze.
The single has been rebuilt in the real-time tool Unreal Engine, to dynamically adapt to how the player navigates the gaming experience’s world. This makes each experience unique in the dynamic version.
The gaming experience can be found on Steam and is created by Swedish creative agency North Kingdom / NoA, with long-running experience of collaborating with gaming and tech companies such as EA, Riot Games, and Google.
Johannes Persson of CULT OF LUNA, comments: “For as long as we have known Linus Johansson of North Kingdom, which spans from the Leave me here video in 2004, he’s always tried to push interactivity and blur the line between the artist and the art. So it came as no surprise to us when he suggested making a video game out of the Cold burn video. ‘Go right ahead’ we said and now we are as intrigued by the result as we hope you are.”
“We’ve done many projects within music videos throughout the years with a unique vision. With the brief from CULT OF LUNA, we saw an interesting creative opportunity to explore what the future holds within music video production – to combine music with real-time technology and interactive storytelling. When we create projects at the intersection between music and gaming, we reach a new audience,” Linus Johansson at North Kingdom comments.
Explore the gaming experience here: http://store.steampowered.com
You can watch the official video for “Cold Burn”, which premiered on December 1st, 2021 below:
