Dark And Handsome: Calvino Noir

I'm a well dcumented sucker for a pretty art style, but Calvino Noir is just gorgeous. Drawing on the black and white genre expertly, it's filled with beams filtering through grates and flashlights illuminating long corridors. It oozes class right up to the late 20s setting and spy-thriller plotline. It's from the team behind the remarkably colourful Morphopolis, presumably in some sort of second album rebellion. A stealth game at heart, lead Dan Walters doesn't want to rule out a gung-ho option, but has made it clear this will make the game far more difficult.

I had a quick shot of the game at EGX and it's definitely still at an early stage. They're developing simultaneously for mobile devices and are still wrestling with the UI, an update about which was recently posted in the game's TIGSource thread. Animation wasn't quite there yet either, which is a shame in a game with a world I want to immerse myself in.

Sneaking around is the core, with twist being that you control multiple characters. In the build that I played, one character was more adept at breaking into areas, but the other didn't need to dodge guards as he was meant to be there. Keeping them together was the challenge, and using their different skillsets to steal some important documents. It wasn't hampered by the phone-phriendly controls, but the mechanics of hiding were quite simple. Some excellent level design will need to pick up the slack in the full game.

The plan for release is some time early next year, on Steam.