Seriously Games' Best Fiends a new hot entertainment property out of Helsinki


    With a cryptic company name and a very solid founding team, many have wondered what’s going on within Seriously Games. I recently sat down at the company’s Kaisaniemi, Helsinki headquarters and got a peek into what the company was working on, their Best Fiends (link should be live today) franchise, announced today.

    Arriving in their meeting room, co-founder and Chief Creative Officer Petri Järvilehto, previously the CCO of Remedy Entertainment games and Executive Vice President of Rovio loaded up the presentation and began playing the game’s background music composed by Heitor Pereira, composer of the original music in Despicable Me, Shrek 2, and Minion Movie. “Welcome to the world of Minutia,” his eyes light up as he tells the story with a raw proudness in his voice.

    As the story goes, the cute bug-infested world of Minutia is a land of a simple paradise – you have mother ladybugs teaching baby ladybugs how to ladybug, and so on. Then suddenly that world is disrupted when a comet strikes the mountain and the formally peaceful slugs living there are transformed into goofy evil versions of themselves. These slugs, who eat everything edible or not in their path, capture all the bugs parents and lock them away, and it’s suddenly up to the bug kids (pupae?) to realize they have the guts to save their parents now prisoners trapped in Mount Boom.

    The company isn’t sharing anything about their free-to-play game yet, other than users will play puzzle levels to unlock new characters, evolve them, and unlock special powers in their first of three planned titles. More information on the game will likely wait until the game’s October release.

    “We really like the sweet subversive direction. With Best Fiends we have really cute approachable characters but they’re all orphans. All bright, all colorful, but a little bit of the dark undertone. No one is really doing that in the casual space,” says Järvilehto.

    “We’re always talking about that contrast, good vs. evil, dark vs. light, cute vs. fiendish. We’re really focused on that, and it’s working really well,” says Andrew Stalbow, another former Rovio executive for strategic partnerships, and previously a Senior Vice President of mobile at FOX.

    With such a strong storyline and characters in their titles, Seriously is building in the hooks to make them a new entertainment property – much like how Angry Birds has been successful but with with potentially more forethought. They’re calling their game a casual game that will be fun for the whole family, so there should be something for everyone.

    They’re careful to say over and over again that their game is the driving force of their IP, but soon enough they’ll have an animated short coming out by Soren Fleng for the Copenhagen Bombay production, who also worked on Angry Birds Toons and Subway Surfers. And for even more content for fans to consume, they’ll soon be releasing original music on Spotify and iTunes, making of videos, limited edition artwork, and stickers for messenger apps in partnership with distributor Swyft Media

    Seriously is backed by €3.7 million in seed funding from Upfront Ventures and Sunstone Capital.

    Without seeing any gameplay yet it’s tough to say more, but between the team Seriously has put together, their partners, and a lovable concept, Seriously seems poised to do something right.

    More information on the game can be found on their website.