Following Part 1 and Part 2 earlier this week, we wrap up our coverage with the third and final round-up of gamescom 2019's bumper crop of upcoming adventure games – this time featuring impending comets, sullen detectives. and of course spore-ridden, giant technology-laden islands.
Brassheart
In this traditional adventure set in an alternate 1920s where mechanical yaks, dieselpunk and robot armies are the objects and themes du jour, you play eccentric pilot and engineer Pola Zagórska. Alongside her robotic chum Pascal, Pola’s on a mission to save her father who’s been kidnapped by his own invention, a vicious supermachine called Valkiria. The key to success seems to lie in pieces of a mechanical heart scattered across the world, which when joined together will create the mysterious “Brassheart” – supposedly the only way to send Valkiria packing for good.
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Hexy Studio's Norbert Pokorski |
Firing up the demo, I was immediately struck by the colourful and detailed Deponia-esque 2D graphics. Gameplay is traditional point-and-click fare, with lots of mechanical gadgets and gizmos to look at and pick up as inventory. I wanted to explore every nook and cranny of each metal-infused expanse to discover more about its retro robotic lore, where batteries and gauges sit alongside AI and anti-gravity generators. At the start I had to help Pola find some way of getting her poor pilot out of a plane that had crash landed and was in danger of blowing up at any second. Getting the pilot loose required a mixture of finding and combining the right objects and an intriguing logic puzzle involving trying to set a clock to the right time and date to get that aforementioned mechanical yak working.
You can use Pascal the robot on certain objects like lasers and levers that need powering up, and he also serves as a location-specific hint system. With one tap this friendly automaton, charmingly voiced by one of developer Hexy Studio’s own team members, will offer a cryptic clue to any puzzles close at hand. It’s a nice way of helping you move on in the game without giving everything away. The gentle banter between Pola and Pascal is fun and elicited a chuckle or two, especially around Pascal’s reluctance to reach certain necessary puzzle-related objects due to his fear of heights: “You’re levitating all the time!” “I know, and it’s terrifying!”
Though traditional in its design inspirations down to a tee, with such an intriguing premise, tight puzzles and a beautiful world to dig deep into, Brassheart may well prove to be more than just the sum of its parts when it hits Windows PC sometime around October of this year.
Minute of Islands
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Studio Fizbin's Oliver Olrich |
Sail the high seas and fix broken giant technology in this narrative 2D side-scrolling adventure from the creators of The Inner World. A mysterious storm of poisonous spores has infected the group of islands that a young upstart mechanic named Mo calls home. Luckily she’s got all the engineering know-how and a certain wand-like device called the Omni Switch that can restore the ancient defense mechanisms (made by giants that live under the islands) built to resist such attacks. Don’t let the bright, comic-style graphics fool you: travelling through the bacteria-ridden archipelago will take its toll on Mo – even in the short demo I played, contact with the damaging germs left her coughing and spluttering as she struggled to fix the three machines needed to return the island back to its former glory.
Developers Studio Fizbin were keen to show me how Mo’s headstrong personality impacts the game. As you jump and climb around each island, which will each represent a different chapter of the game, a narrator comments on Mo’s actions, which sometimes go against the player’s will. At one stage the diminutive protagonist is given the option of kicking back with one of the island’s occupants with a bottle of wine, but whilst I was all for a bit of grape-infused relaxation, Mo thought differently, so the narrator had no choice but to comment that she was too focused on her quest to care about wine at the moment, and on with the story we went.
Each island will have its own unique style and feel, but all will hold a couple of environmental puzzles to solve and branched pathways to take so you can choose which ones to work on and which way to go first. Along the way are “memory points” that allow you to cause Mo to remember a certain anecdote about something related to that spot which draws you more into the lore of that island. You can also opt to brush past them all, just like with the many collectibles you can pick up (or not) in secret areas along the way, though the team told me these will serve more of a purpose than just being a meaningless completion statistic.
You can do your best to help restore young Mo’s world in early 2020 when Minute of Islands is released on Windows, Mac, PS4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch.
Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit
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(L-R) Tag of Joy's Justinas Malijonis, Šarūnas and Žilvinas Ledas, Mingailė Striaukaitė |
The “George and Nico” vibes are strong in this tale of an American thrown into ancient European history, which isn't surprising as some of the team behind Crowns and Pawns were involved in the acclaimed freeware fan sequel Broken Sword 2.5: The Return of the Templars. This is a traditional point-and-click adventure taking place within a grand tour around Europe to uncover a mysterious family secret, uprooted from its buried past when main character Milda travels from her home city of Chicago to read the last will of her deceased grandfather. Hijinks and melodramatic villains soon appear, and it’s up to our blonde American to uncover the family riddles that reveal the secrets of the king who was never crowned.
The demo saw me exploring the abandoned house of Milda’s grandfather in Lithuania for clues. The clean, realistic renderings draw comparisons to other modern 3D adventures like Telltale’s Sam & Max series. Wearing its classic adventure influences on its sleeve, items can be picked up and combined in inventory, and the puzzles I encountered felt like just the right level of making you feel faintly clever for solving them but never so taxing that you’ll be stumped for too long. For example, you discover that some of the blank pages you’ve been picking up through the house may have invisible ink on them, so you’ll need to figure out how to reveal what's hidden and then find the right items required and hey presto, you’re onto the next challenge: deciphering what on earth is written in the ink!
Here’s hoping this tale of historical intrigue can live up to its classic heritage when it’s unearthed on Windows, Mac and Xbox One in 2020.
RESORT
A comet’s about to hit the sleepy town of Laburnum Creek, but even given their evident impending doom, some of the inhabitants don’t want to leave. As an inquisitive writer named Laura it’s all perfect fodder for your next book, so you ride on over to the forested former health resort to interview the remaining few and find out what’s keeping them from packing their bags.
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Backwoods Entertainment's Matthias Nikutta |
Unsurprisingly, all is not as it seems at a place where people are willing to die rather than deal with some admittedly unique real estate issues, so Laura soon finds herself uncovering the buried secrets of the townsfolk. The game, from the team behind Unforeseen Incidents, will take place in the days leading up to the comet’s impact, with gameplay consisting of Laura building up friendships with those around her and conducting interviews with the people left behind. I got to try the interview mechanic with one of the residents. This lets you choose various approaches – friendly, sarcastic, direct, etc. – to get more from your subject. There are no puzzles in RESORT; the main challenge will be picking your own path through these interviews, but there’s no wrong way to play. As well as conversing with them, there will also be side quests from the residents which Laura can complete to endear her a little more to them, and maybe help her reveal something juicy.
With all of this rushing around, it’s a good thing there’s a gorgeous 3D expanse in which to do it, taking in Firewatch-like sun-blushed pine trees and crystal clear lakes either on foot or in your trusty orange station wagon. Developers Backwoods Entertainment say they chose to keep the graphics low-poly to fit with the retro 1970s setting, which also might explain Laura’s groovy afro hairstyle and flares. Camera angles proved quite obstructive and awkward in my playthrough, which undermined some of the fun, but there’s still time for this to all be polished up long before the game is released.
RESORT is planned for a 2021 launch on PC and Switch.
Transient
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Stormling Studios' Oral Samli
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In this ode to cyberpunk and Lovecraftian cosmic horror from the makers of Conarium and the Darkness Within series, you play hacker-for-hire Randolph Carter, one of the few members of society still thriving in a post-apocalyptic future world gone badly wrong. The groups of people who have managed to survive alongside our protagonist live inside a citadel called the Domed City Providence, but wouldn’t you know it, Randolph soon discovers something that warps his version of reality altogether.
Whilst you’ll come across all kinds of weird and freaky creatures in Transient, like a fluorescent jellyfish alien, this is a puzzle game, not an action game. Logical brainteasers like sliding several circular tiles so that all the serpents depicted on them eat their own tails are dripping with Lovecraftian lore, but I also had to make use of a “scanner” function to pick out details in an investigation scene I otherwise couldn’t see to solve one challenge. You’ll swap between reality and another alternate dream state – sometimes at will and sometimes very much not – as you delve deeper into the secrets of Providence and the mysterious forces within it. I got a definite BioShock vibe from the dark hallways and misty, neon-drenched rooms all rendered in first-person 3D, though the gameplay felt much more linear in the section I played rather than allowing exploration of this alternative realm how you like.
The demo didn’t give much more away about why this is all happening to Randolph, so you’ll have to wait until Transient’s 2020 release date on PC, PS4 and Xbox to delve any deeper into this shadowy tale that straddles the line between the real and the abstract.
Game information
GAME INFO
The Season of the Warlock is an adventure game by enComplot released in 2022 for Linux, Mac, PC. It has a Stylized art style, presented in 2D or 2.5D and is played in a Third-Person perspective.
