Some info from the devs:
David Dedeine - Lead Designer wrote:"It was a multiplayer 3rd person view split screen game mixing racing and fighting arena to win the "totem" at the end. I was in love with the art very "different".."
Christian Huaux - Programmer wrote:"The story is interesting. Was hired at Kalisto for this game, Totem, we created a brand new engine, with editor, a pc runtime, and a dreamcast runtime. The game was like a mario racing, but with characters, they were cute aliens, splitscreen up to 4 player, after the early performance of the dreamcast the decision was made to switch to ps2. and later the game was canceled. The engine produce for the game was very good, so Kalisto kept it under the name TotemTech. The game engine was used by multiple games in the studio. It was even used for a demo made for square, as kalisto just finished their work with square (and testuo nomura) on a ps1 game, for a game on ps2 that was no finally signed. When kalisto closed, a few existing projet and teams were taken by other publishers, i was lead prog on totemtech on a game called Spirits and Spells or Castleween (depending on the region) on ps2 and gc. A new studio started in bordeaux, Asobo studio, came out with superfarm, their first title on TotemTech. Even games like a plague tale and flight simulator 2020 are running on TotemTech, in the us ex Kalisto USA at austin released Sponge bob, and a jimmy neutron game, at ubisoft montreal we used totemtech on ShaunWhite snowboard 1 et 2 sur wii, psp, ps2, and it was used for Mighty Quest For Epic Loot pc. Another Paris company BlackSheep studio used it for 2 or 3 games also (also old Kalisto's employees)."
"The game was running. but we were still early in the production, there was aroung 5 6 map already, and 4 characters."
"David Perry was a paid consultant on the game, he came two days to discuss game design etc in our team."