Amelia Tyler, Voice of Tiphany, Blanket, Camellia, and many more!

Amelia Tyler is a highly experienced, alarmingly versatile voiceover and actor known for her ability to breathe life into scripts and create unique, unforgettable characters that grab listeners by the scruff of the imagination.

Equally comfortable prowling a booth, set or volume, in her 20+ years as a performer she's worked in almost every area of the industry, from movies and video games to stage productions and national ad campaigns. She sounds exactly how she looks… sometimes.

1. How did you get involved with the development of Forgotton Anne?

I specialise in voice acting and full performance capture for games so I've been in a whole bunch of other titles so far. I think I'm best known for playing the enigmatic half-demon Malady in BAFTA-winning RPG Divinity Original Sin II, though I've also played troubled exobiologist Dr Sarah Brook in The Turing Test, elderly space explorer Rebecca Weston in Elite Dangerous: Horizons, plus a tonne of other roles in titles like Star Wars Battlefront II and Frostpunk. I first became aware of Forgotton Anne when I was at EGX a couple of years back and a friend of mine at Square Enix introduced me to the creators. The game had just been announced by Square Enix Collective and the look and feel of it made my brain all fizzy, so I think they could see how passionate I was about the project from the start. Either that or they were just appeasing the grinning lunatic!

2. Can you tell us a bit about the characters you are playing in Forgotton Anne, and how you approached the roles?

I play a lot of characters in this game - all the female roles aside from Anne, I believe - and often they'd be appearing together in the same scene so it was crucial that I gave them very distinct voices. Luckily, the style of the game lends itself well to extremes of characterisation. During our recording sessions, Alfred and I talked a lot about how the physicality of an object might affect the way that it speaks. For example, a lamp is likely to have a very different speed, tone and rhythm to a jack-in-the-box or a blanket and would probably think very differently too. It was really fun to figure out new ways to use my voice in order to bring them to life and give them completely unique personalities, not just different accents. My favourites to play were probably Mrs Hue (a sweet old camera) and Camellia (a young, bouncy playground toy) - they were such total opposites in pretty much every way and playing them made me *feel* different.

Mrs Hue made me feel all warm and cuddly, like I wanted to snuggle up with tea and biscuits, while Camellia's young, energetic and easily distracted so bouncing around from one thought to another gave me an incredible surge of childlike energy for hours afterwards. Tiphany (a lamp) was also very interesting to play. She could have easily been just 'nice' and a bit one-dimensional so I loved being able to give her some (please forgive me for this) light and shade as the game went on. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm going to pun hell now.

3. What do you think of Forgotton Anne and the project?

To me Forgotton Anne is the perfect example of how old and new techniques can be married to create something totally new and innovative, yet simultaneously reassuringly familiar in feel. The look of the game instantly makes me think back to the cartoons and movies I used to watch when I was growing up, which is rather fitting given the world of forgotten items that's been created. The music is utterly glorious and makes my heart sing - it was such a lovely surprise to hear some of that for the first time. However, it's the story that I think players will be most surprised by. It's easy to see a humorous animated game and assume that it's going to just be all laughs and silly characters but this story goes so, so much deeper than that. I'll be really interested to see how players react as the plot progresses, and how they make their moral decisions at certain points of the game.

4. What's next for you?

A lot of my upcoming roles are for games that haven't been announced yet (or the cast is still being kept secret) so I can't talk about much of what I've got coming up. However, I'm in a few titles that I *can* talk about... I'll be playing my first two lead roles in games this year: Scarlet in The Occupation (a real-time, politically-driven narrative game) and Cooper in The Spectrum Retreat (an eerie narrative-focused puzzler), plus I'll also be in a bunch of other games such as We Happy Few, Du Lac and Fey: Dance of Death and The Bard's Tale IV (all of these should be out at some point this year). I'm also working on quite a few other exciting projects, both in the voice booth and the mocap volume... It's going to be an exceptionally interesting year and I'll never stop feeling grateful and a little bit stunned that I get to do all this crazy fun stuff and call it 'my job'.

5. If you were an object in the Forgotten Lands, what would you be? I think I'd probably be an Etch-a-Sketch. I'm very good at being intensely creative for bursts of time but my long-term memory is horrendous!