Knights and Bikes: a game that combines The Goonies with Cornwall

Two of the team behind LittleBigPlanet have formed their own studio to create a co-op adventure title about childhood friendship - and pickled knights' heads

There is so much warmth, beauty and nostalgia in video games at the moment. We're seeing a whole generation of designers who may once have once worked on huge projects, but who have now taken leave of the mainstream industry to explore personal experiences and memories. We see it in Firewatch, influenced by the co-designer's own knowledge of the Wyoming wilderness; we see it in Unravel, a game all about creator Martin Sahlin's love of rural Northern Sweden; and we'll soon see it in Knights and Bikes, a co-operative exploration game set on a fictitious Cornish island.

In this case, the memories belong to hugely talented artist Rex Crowle, once of Media Molecule, where he worked on LittleBigPlanet and its follow-up Tearaway. As a child in Cornwall he grew up amid the county's tiny fishing villages, enjoying their wonky, cluttered architecture. As he recalls: "There were little cottages with impossible perspectives, tumbling out of each other with doors in the roofs, and all kinds of details and history nailed to their exterior walls."