Accidental audio creation and island exploration are the tasks at hand in Proteus, although everything in the game is less of a ‘task’ and more of a possibility. Wandering around randomly generated landscapes, which are like storybook dreams from yesteryear, the player discovers visual features that trigger audio effects, from the plinky-plonky strum of rainfall to the jolly synth-speak of peculiar lifeforms. I think they’re lifeforms anyway. They may just be forms because that’s the kind of stroll this is; a perambulation through a world of beautiful, gentle wonder. The beta is now available to preorder customers, who’ll be paying $7.50 and receiving all future updates and an EP.

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Proteus EP is a musical exploration game from Twisted Tree Games. It’s an EP as opposed to an LP – there are plans for a larger experience to follow – and as an EP will be a brief exploration experience that blends a pastoral 3D pixel-art world with “reactively mixed” music. Ed Key from Twisted Tree explained: “It’s more of an ambient piece than a game, although there is some challenge in finding the location that allows you to progress, and in finding the other couple of locations on the island that have interesting effects.”

I’ve been wandering around a preview version of it for the last twenty minutes, and I can report that it’s charming, and mildly mesmerising – an experience not unlike that bit in a movie where a child wanders into some weird wonderland and ends up gazing about in slack-jawed delight. (That was me.) No release date yet, but the team are planning to release for around $5, and there’s some footage below.
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