Hiya! In our first first blog post, we talked about our main goal as a game studio: taking puzzle games to new realms by making them more open and visually-rich. To better illustrate this, let us present our first game: Outer Wonders!
What kind of game is Outer Wonders?
A pixel art game that refinedly mixes adventure and puzzle mechanics! In this game, you will play as Bibi (pronounce: "bee-bee"), the cute round monkey you can see below:
As Bibi, you will be exploring the natural wonders surrounding your village, and investigating the threats hovering over nature in order to protect it.
Outer Wonders will be quest-based, like most adventure games, while leaving area for a great deal of exploration. The storyline will progress as you complete main quests, and completing side quests will unlock bonuses or more puzzles for the challenge.
Quests will consist in visiting and investigating certain areas through exploration puzzles in a tile-based environment, as shown below.
It turns out Bibi is a pretty childish character, and its favorite means of transportation consists in… rolling. Using its own body.
The in-puzzle gameplay will reflect this: once you pick a direction for moving, Bibi will roll towards this direction until he hits an obstacle. As shown above, you will be able to chain moves in order to travel more seamlessly.
Planning your moves ahead of time may come in handy in such puzzles. However, the game will also foster your desire for exploration and testing to make your experience smoother, in case you're a fan of a trial-and-error approach.
How is this game different?
The puzzles that the Outer Wonders adventure is made of will be more elaborate than traditional maze games. Altering the environment in order to find your way through the puzzles will be a core component of Outer Wonders' gameplay.
Do you want to turn at this crossroad, but there is no obstacle for you to stop your move and redirect it? Maybe there's a bud on the road that you can grow a plant from, and maybe this plant could stop your move once grown!
See for yourself below.
Puzzles will also progressively grow vertical: some parts of the environment will open the way up to higher levels, while some others will open the way down to lower levels.
And there's more! More game mechanics will come into play throughout the adventure for more diversity. More on this in a future blog post.
For now, we're aiming for a Steam/GOG release for Windows, macOS et Linux in 2021. Depending on the opportunities that arise, we will also release Outer Wonders for the Nintendo Switch.
We hope you liked this overview of Outer Wonders! We're so impatient to show you more.
In the meantime, you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and even subscribe to our RSS feed. A Discord community server is also on the way!
See you soon!