Overmorrow on Kickstarter today

Written by Jack Allin — March 17, 2022 at 10:02

Time limits are often considered anathema in adventure games, but when done right they can be an integral part of the experience. That is certainly true of indie developer PixelManta's upcoming Overmorrow, a minimalist exploratory adventure facing its own time limit of sorts in its crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. 

Players control a kite-like creature who washes up "on a beach of a mysterious island, with no direction and no abilities." To learn more about your surroundings, and perhaps eventually find a way to escape, you must explore the island for "points of interest" that will reveal new pieces of the unfolding "underlying metanarrative" mystery, in which "not everything is as it may seem on the surface." Along the way you'll acquire new abilities that can affect the environment and allow progress beyond what you could otherwise achieve, but "finding all the pieces you need will take a number of days." And therein lies the rub, as you have only thirty in-game days before your quest ends and your progress is reset. Events play out differently depending on what you've accomplished, so it's important to have a strategic plan in order to "discover all of the island's secrets" before time runs out.

Described as a "serene, non-violent exploration adventure," Overmorrow is a third-person game with an overhead view and a distinctive minimalist aesthetic. The goal is to provide players with a "tranquil" experience with a "gameplay focus on unguided exploration and big-picture puzzle solving" in which the entire island can be seen as "one giant game-long puzzle solved in many tiny pieces with a limited number of actions and days." The thirty-day deadline looms over everything you do, but rather than being based on real-time, it is up to players to determine when each day will end. A single day can "take as long or as little as you wish," but the catch is that "you are limited in the amount of changes you can make to the world until you rest." 

At first you'll be able to do very little but roam the immediately accessible parts of the island, but by collecting scattered runes, you'll eventually learn how to manipulate plants, flames, and bodies of water, and even how to "communicate with beasts." The power of the runes is finite and will drain after use, but the more runes you collect, the more you can achieve, and "when you rest and progress to the next day, it replenishes ... all the runes you have collected so far." Some of the changes you make will become permanent, while "others will only last until the end of your current day," giving you more incentive to properly plan your approach. 

While Overmorrow is the developer's first solo game, Marcus Clarke is no stranger to the industry, having worked on franchises such as Sonic, Sackboy and Warhammer to date. This game is a personal "passion project," and as such Clarke has launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise £15,000 by April 14th. If successful, we could see the game released on Steam for Windows PC sometime before the end of this year.