Sleeches - Revolution or Devolution?

Note: This post is largely adapted from a comment I made on Reddit. I wanted to organize my thoughts a little better and also provide a place for them on the site, since I put some work into finding this stuff.

Fleeches were meant to appear in Soulstorm…

Oddly enough, despite them ultimately not appearing in the game, some oversights and datamined content seems to point towards the fact, that Fleeches (whether in their original form or reworked is sadly not known) were meant to appear in Soulstorm.

One of the most obvious examples is the following scene, where they are outright named both in speech and subtitles:

And if one digs into the game files, there’s mentions of “Fleech eggs” and a bunch of left-in data meant for them:

In fact, even merchandise released as part of the game’s initial marketing push features them:

… Except maybe not!

I’d love to just go and call this an open and shut case – Fleeches were considered, then removed and replaced by Sleeches, end of story.

Only the story doesn’t end, because there’s also been an out of universe retcon posted on the official Discord by the game’s executive designer:

Tarp: Do you know anything about Sleeches? Lol. Specifically if there is any relation in-universe whatsoever to fleeches.

benten0692: Great question, Fleeches are the Sleeches hatchlings.

And I mean, sure, this explains most of the discrepancies, but it still doesn’t really explain the “why’. Why were the originals replaced with those little black puffballs, when the old Fleeches were arguably a lot more terrifying? Why so late in development that an unusual amount of references slipped past QA?

I’ll do my best to offer two explanations, one considering stuff said by Bennie Terry, the other by Lanning.

Theory 1: AI Issues

My first guess is that they were unable to make Fleeches work in a “natural” way.

I base this on the fact that we got confirmation that the reason why wildlife never really appears in Soulstorm is because OWI simply couldn’t reconcile their AI with the new level geometry:

benten0692: Unfortunately they [Scrabs, Paramites, and Fleeches] wont be making it into Soulstorm. The legacy motion code that controls their behaviors was designed in a way that incurred way too much technical debt to overcome for this production. Moving forward into future products, all NPC logic will be re written from the ground up so that we can deploy and expand their capabilities.

He added the following in another post, which I’m including for extra context:

benten0692: NPC motion code (Ai) - This partially due to legacy code which equates to what I refer to as “Technical Debt” Trying work with code/logic that still to this day is incredible complex and engineered to a specific design i.e. “2.5d side scrolling platformer” and evolving that code to meet new expectations is challenging.

So this theory posits that, instead of putting extra effort in, they opted to use a creature which doesn’t require any orientation. After all, Sleeches are pretty much balls, which jump all over the place. With so many of them around, mostly bathed in darkness, it’s a lot harder to spot any visual bugs with them, than a Fleech which is expected to crawl over the ground and use its tongue as a grappling hook.

Theory 2: Fear of the Dark

The first time Lanning mentioned Fleeches and Sleeches in one context was in April, 2021, where he described them as “slightly different”, without delving into any actual connection between the two. Then, just a few months later in a Q&A from July, 2021, he gave a much more detailed explanation:

Lorne Lanning: I wanted to have [behaviours] where light scared away creatures. And this is why the Fleeches are something different from the Sleeches, because I didn’t want to just redo Fleeches, Fleeches were their own thing.

So the Sleeches would be something different, but again, they would be, you know, found in these underground areas and in the dark and so the idea, that, remember in Pitch Black, the movie, there was a moment when a guy lights a match like maybe for a cigarette or something and all of sudden you see everything’s surrounding him, right? But you couldn’t see it until the match was list.

It was just really creepy and I was like, “I’d love to be able to use light as a repelling device.” And then have something that’s consistently chasing you in numbers, like, you know, how the Paramites would or something and so that play against them was something I really liked. I would have liked to, you know, I think it could be taken a lot further and if Sleeches appear again, you know, we could do more with them to maybe make it plate better.

Seeing these two videos, it’d again be so convenient to say “the case is open and shut”; Fleeches are “their own thing” and they simply realized late into development, that they might as well use a whole new creature to do the scary light chase sequences.

Yet once more, things aren’t so simple. Throwing a proverbial wrecking ball into our neat, clean explanation, half a year after the original video’s release, Lanning also began echoing the whole “evolution” concept!

Vlam: Could you tell us more about the connection between Sleeches and Fleeches?

Lorne Lanning: We were looking at some of the the ways that creatures metamorphosize over time and, you know, if it’s the original fleeches, as you saw, they were, you know, felt very “alligator-like” and we were like: “Okay but what’s more the caterpillar stage of that?” You know, like, “What’s more of that? What did it come out of?”

And we didn’t want to stay too literal with the double heads on each side, because we really wanted something that you know had to turn around in the earlier embryonic sense of it.

So it does go into a hibernation state, and cocoon, and then transforms, and then breaks its previous shell.

Yes, first Sleech to become a Fleech.

Conclusion

So, at the end of the day, the real answer probably lies somewhere between the two explanations. There were likely issues with the original AI code and Fleeches as they were couldn’t be included in the game for the same reason Scrabs and Paramites were cut too. However, in a move that’s similar to the Meeches (though sadly far less cool, because all the explanations are done outside the game) OWI chose to turn this limitation into a development and connect the two creatures.

Personally, I am not a huge fan of Sleeches, I think they’re far less inspired and threatening compared to our beloved (or rather feared) “alligator-worms”, but at the very least these explanations imply that they do not retcon Fleeches out of existence, which I think is a win.

In the last video quoted in this post, Lanning also mentions experimenting with seeing a “third” evolution of the Sleech -> Fleech metamorphosis, however, whether this is just an idle idea or something they’re actually going to deliver on remains to be seen.