Moonburnt Studio has just launched a Square Enix collective campaign for their truly beautiful non-linear point & click adventure game, that features silhouette graphics, “COLUMNAE: A Past Under Construction.”
The game is set in a post-apocalyptic steampunk world, ruined by a gradual environmental catastrophe that left the air on the surface unbreathable about 140 years ago. To escape the catastrophe, the rich built a haven for themselves high in the skies and those who could not afford it had to hide within its pillars. The story is focused on a society descended from people who couldn’t afford to inhabit Deus – the “city in the clouds”, in the moment when the ecological disaster was imminent. Deus is a closed town surrounded by a mechanical steel shell, and built upon 127 gigantic (over 600m/2000ft high) metal pillars – Columnae. Beneath them, a huge underground machinery, called Machina, was built with the purpose of automatically extracting and processing resources and sending them via pipes through Columnae and into Deus. This way, Machina was constructed to provide all the necessary resources to the people living in Deus indefinitely, so they would never have to leave it again – and to this day, they never did.
As a player, you are one of those unlucky many who survive in Columnae, the pillars of Deus. During the game, you’ll explore the Columnae filled with intrigue, the underground Machina holding secrets from the past, the anarcho-tribal society of The Cliffs, and the industrious Greenhouse Dome owned by The Baroness, all in order to find your way into the heaven on Earth – Deus.
“COLUMNAE” aims to create a non-linear experience by exploring retrocausality. The game starts in the middle of story and your actions will affect both the future and the history of the world. As you play, the game will try to find an explanation in the past for your behaviour in the present. Since the story unfolds in an a chronological way, when you play the chapters set in the past, you’ll be able to see those explanations, a different history on potentially each playthrough.
You can find out more about the world of “COLUMNAE” and vote for it on Square Enix Collective.
“COLUMNAE: A Past Under Construction” is currently under development for PC, Mac and Linux. There is no release date set yet, but the team is aiming for a crowdfunding campaign in 2016.
Developed by Moonburnt Studio, a small independent studio based in Belgrade, Serbia. It was founded two years ago by three close friends and took shape during an artist residency on the magical Portuguese island of Madeira. There they started making their first game, which grew into a big project called “ COLUMNAE: A Past Under Construction “. Over time the team has changed, but it is still small and cozy, with four members aboard.
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