The thing that started to resonate with us was that if everything else was weird, then the character is going to be much more mundane. So if you're in a spaceship with giant robots and you have some cool armor, you're going to just look like a part of the scenery...

...So what we're trying to do is put it in a more conventional setting so that the weird sh*t is far more strange and that when you come into it we can sort of gently ease people into the stranger elements

At the beginning of the game when we do the prologue he's just kind of this anti-hero kind of guy. And very simply, concretely in the game, there are certain types of barriers that he has to open with contextual stuff. And then when he changes, then he begins tearing those things off and becomes much more brutal. So what we're trying to do is convey that evolution on the inside, but also convey it on the outside so that those game elements that are around him are evolving as he does.

there are a lot of potential downsides to that so that's why I'm a little bit gun-shy of you there. Because there's a lot of tuning involved - what you're trying to do is to guess the player's intentions...
...We're not going to simplify it such that people feel like they're just pushing forward and then "win, win, win", you know? The "I Win" button, right?

Via IGN