First-person Stealth-o-Metafiction: Somewhere

If I could be anywhere right now, it'd be Somewhere. Look at this video game! Now listen to the song which plays on that radio. Now listen to that song while continuing to look at Somewhere.

It's a first-person "exploration and stealth" game (with leaning and everything) about different perspectives and incomplete understanding, possessing people to see the world through their eyes and turning the world around. We cast our eye over it in March but oh my, two-man team Oleomingus have been very busy since then. Look at all these wonderful things.

Somewhere is about the search for a mythical town, Kayamgadh, and the different perspectives of every character in that story. To piece it together, you'll need to be sneaky. Oleomingus explain:

Mirroring a player's insidious intrusion, Somewhere is played as a stealth game. Sneak up on people, possess them and navigate the Gameworld as different characters. The narrative distortion that accompanies a shift in character, is further exacerbated by the convoluted construction of it's surreal spaces. The player will often walk into photographs, move through disconnected spaces, insidiously listen to other conversations and form an understanding of the world that no character within the story can individually posses.

Possessing people will give different views of the world itself as well as events and characters, as does stepping into photographs:

More words:

Central to game play in Somewhere is the ability to turn into every character within the story being narrated. A player travels through the game world by becoming other people, and as you navigate identities, you realise that each person you become is a figment of another character's imagination and a part of yet another story. Somewhere is therefore, most of all, a collection of stories. A collection that spawns characters through which a player might comprehend this Gameworld.

As the description might hint, Somewhere is inspired by writers like Jorge Luis Borges, whose collection Labyrinths I cannot recommend enough, and Italo Calvino, author of Invisible Cities and If on a Winter's Night a Traveller.

Oleomingus are posting loads of screenshots and things regularly on their Tumblr, and writing dev updates in their TIGForums thread. Pretty much of all this is work-in-progress.

They're working towards an alpha build now, but you can play an early crack at a short pre-alpha spin-off. Released in January, Fictions is a self-contained story inspired by Borges's The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim, a review of a fictitious book.