William Pugh's Studio Taking Flight With Heist Game

News by Philippa Warr Contributor

Published on Dec. 3, 2015

A little while back William Pugh (who partnered with Davey Wreden on The Stanley Parable), Dominik Johann, Jack de Quidt and Sean O'Dowd formed a studio called Crows Crows Crows and began teasing their first game [official site countdown thinger] via an ARG. For those of you (and by "you" I secretly mean "us") who have been intrigued by the Crows Crows Crows emails but lacked the time and patience to get anywhere with the ARG , a lovely email has arrived to spell out a bunch more information about the project.

Apparently we are to expect a "sort of heist game" involving the voice of Simon Amstell at around 5pm tomorrow (Friday 4 December). Here's the relevant bits of the email:

"It's going to be starring award winning comedian Simon Amstell, who has whispered and yelped and joked around into a microphone for us, and it's – well. We don't want to spoil it.

"Here’s what we’ll tell you. It’s a strange and whirlwind sort of heist game, it’s between 15 and 20 minutes long, and here is ONE screenshot of it: [That's the screenshot at the top of the post, by the way]"

Obviously the game is still a bit of a mystery at this point but I'm unexpectedly excited at the prospect of Simon Amstell joining the project. I mean, I've enjoyed his work since Popworld (God, Popworld was so good) but I suspect his kind of performance and style would work well with what William tends to produce. Irritatingly I'm away this weekend so I will have to wait until Monday to find out how it works in actuality!

Disclaimer:

I don't know William Pugh particularly well. Mostly there's low-level friendly antagonism. He invited me to play one of his games and then put my in-game name badge on the floor so my character had to pick it up. I also had the keys to his Twitter account for a while as part of a crowd-sourcing experiment. I posted a single link to some interesting research the Wellcome Trust was doing and added some binary instructions in his header image. I wasn't really feeling it. If you want to hear other (far more interesting) Twitter stories ask Alice what happened when she asked me to look after her account for a while and then told me off for not trolling her. Lessons were learned by Alice about far more subtle brands of dickbaggery than her own, I can tell you that much.