Have You Played... Omnia Mecum Porto?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.

I spent a year writing DevLog Watch, a weekly column in which I would link to developers who were charting the game creation process from its first moments. It's been entertaining in the years since to watch many of those games grow and eventually be released, but of those that didn't make it, I'm most sad to never get to play a finished version of Omnia Mecum Porto.

OMP was a luggage simulator: you would pack a back by dropping shapes on a grid like in some many RPGs, and then press a button to send the bag's owner on a journey. Their adventures would be relayed to you in text: they left an item behind by accident after camping in a field; they bought a new trinket in a harbour town; they read that novel they brought along while feeling lonely late at night.

The items that you'd packed, whether they had practical purposes or not, would then take on a sentimental value to the traveller. These items would have the power to get them through long, dark nights on the road, to give them the strength to overcome obstacles and keep on travelling. But should you throw them away to make space for more obviously useful items like flashlights and first aid kits and food?

I only ever played a very rough jam game prototype, but I loved what it might have become. Sadly even this no longer available online and all that remains is a handful of undeleted devlog updates.