To Azimuth's Paranormal Adventure Coming In 2017
Aliens did it?
I was excited about To Azimuth [official site] when it turned to Kickstarter in 2014. An adventure game about a brother and sister in '70s Alabama searching for their lost brother, who may or may not have been abducted by aliens, sounds right up my alley. It helped that developers [bracket]games had already released a game I liked, Three Fourths Home. While To Azimuth's Kickstarter campaign sadly failed, [bracket] continued working on it quietly. Now they're piping up again with an announcement that, barring alien abduction or other tragedy, it should be out in early 2017, Have a look in this new trailer:
That's Eli, a Vietnam war veteran and recovering addict who's gone... somewhere. Susannah convinces her other brother Nate to return to Alabama and search for him, and off they go. Playing as Susannah or Nate, you'll trot off and roam around in search of Eli, investigating what happened to him. Nate and Susannah's malleable stories go in different but interconnected directions, and... I like the sound of it? It sounds nice? Three Fourths Home (which ended up nominated for the narrative award in the 2015 IGF) was a condensed ball of one family's anxieties and problems, unfolding with pleasant amounts of concern, emotional distance, warmth, and worry, worry, worry. Probably a lot to worry about when your traumatised brother may have been abducted by aliens.
And I'm a sucker for that hard-edged minimalist 3D style.
To Azimuth is due in 2017, before the end of March.
Here's a peep at an old prototype from November 2014, when it was on Kickstatrer:
