A couple of years ago, when Microsoft announced that the Xbox One will require a constant connection to the Internet, a scandal broke out. The creative director Adam ORT then directly stated on Twitter that he approves and supports this idea, and who does not agree, should “come to terms with this”. A wave of human indignation covered Orta with his head, and he had to leave the company.
He moved from Seattle to California, returned to his family, lost weight and founded an independent studio Three One Zero. And recently announced his first game – Adr1ft, The simulator of all an abandoned astronaut.
Cosmos without monsters and war
► adrenaline action is not worth waiting. Everything happens smoothly and measuredly, and does not kill weapons, but a lack of oxygen in the cylinder.
ORT classifies the game to the FPX – First Person Experience genre. In free translation – "Game experience from the first person". The game is entirely devoted to space and communicating with it one on one. No wars and trade, lasers and light swords are dusting in a safe; You will not be forced to master the planets, they will not scare xenomorphs and other cosmic creatures. The main thing in Adr1ft – silence. Yes, such that you will hear the sound of your own breath in the spacesuit.
ORT claims that his new game is a metaphor for hardships that fell to his lot. He suffered a crushing blow abandoned by everyone, he alone tried to get out of the vacuum in which he ended up. So far the nameless main character of the game is similar trouble: she comes to her senses at the near -Earth space station. The defeat around, the wires and broken electronics sparkle, and cunning devices soar in zero gravity mixed with household accessories … and the bodies of astronaut colleagues. The girl’s task will be to find out the causes of the accident and, if possible, return to the sinful, but such a native land.
To do this, first you have to learn how to control yourself, and the movement between the five cs surviving after the explosion is a test in itself. In conditions of zero gravity, the astronaut can only swim slowly and slowly in an arbitrary direction.
► from time to time a spacesuit will have to patch up.
To get to a specific place-for example, the dashboard at a distance of some pairs of meters-you need to first set the direction, pushing away from the wall or something screwed to the floor. Only then will the heroine smoothly fly to the goal.
This completely changes the feeling of the world and itself in it. After all, the simplest actions (say, get out of the sofa and take two steps towards the nightstand with a telly remote control) in space are a difficult task, which you need to break your head.
The second thing we do not think about and perceive for reality is oxygen. At the depressurized station, its reserves are greatly limited. There is no one to fight the astronaut with, no one can kill her, and her main and only enemy is a cylinder behind her back, the stock of which treacherously melts with every sigh. It is necessary to constantly monitor the indicator of the level of oxygen and, if it falls strongly, urgently look for a new cylinder. Otherwise – death. And the end of the game.
"Green" mission
► Desert interiors of the destroyed orbital station press on the psyche even stronger than endless cosmos black.
Before the accident, the crew had a completely peaceful mission: experiments with photosynthesis in outer space. This is indicated by the young green leaves, which are soaring here and there, contrasting with the dead silence of the universe.
Something similar configurators repeats the sound recording device by the voice of Andrew McDonan, who was missing an astronaut who has been on board this “tin can” for more than two years. He was all wildly tired of everything, and he had long been disappointed in what they did here. In other records, the same person longingly recalls his daughter and constantly listens to the recording of the sonata No. 8 of Beethoven in her performance on the piano.
As in many games with the study of the world, we will look for audio days on the basis of which a picture of the incident is built. The second source of truth about what happened is the procedurally generated puzzles, tied to the restoration of all abstruse mechanisms.
True, the one showed by the developers is not particularly impressive. In total, you need to twist the scattered pieces of a certain unit in zero gravity, and then push them into the corresponding grooves, illuminated by flashing diodes. The task is simple, but we hope for something more non-trivial in the future.
Friend of the developer
► Visually, the game balances between the films “Interstellar” and “Gravity” … ► … which is not surprising, because the Unreal Engine 4 engine is responsible for the quality of the picture.
In work on Adr1ft Orthu is helped by his long -time friend – Omar Aziz, a former colleague in several parts Medal of Honor. Once they both worked in EA, but then their paths parted: ORT settled down in Microsoft, and Aziz-to the TreyARCH studio, which is engaged in Call of Duty.
Now they are again working side by side, and it is possible that the popular militant played an important role in developing the concept of their joint game. If you remember, in the last part there was a short but bright scene in open space, with a first -person view. IN Adr1ft the actions are incomparably smaller, but the immersion is much stronger. The authors screwed the support of Oculus Rift. Our Western colleagues-journalists, who had a chance to look at the stars through the optics of a smart helmet, say that from a sense of height and infinity in the unavailable head dizzy and the heart freezes.
And we are not surprised. When the helmet was on our tests, the lump rolled up to the throat even while playing much less extreme things. What can we say about soaring in zero gravity ..
► Here the head goes around and without the helmet of the virtual reality of Oculus Rift.
But the strongest moment is the first exit to the break in the fuselage of the orbital station. Here opens a bewitching view of the Earth – an island of life among endless eternal black. Maybe developers want to encourage us to think about the fragility of the world and how damn we were lucky to live on this planet.
* * *
The authors themselves characterize Adr1ft as a cross between an action from the first person (as an example, they are immodestly call the legendary Half-Life), adventure-travel Journey And the film "Gravity". True, ORT assures that he met the movie by Alfonso Koaron, when work on the new game was already boiling, and Aziz has not yet watched it at all, so all the coincidences are random. We will believe it?
Success factors
Risk factors
- A rare game about peaceful space;
- a chance to feel weightlessness;
- No lasers and blasters.
- no lasers and blaster;
- The promised puzzles are not yet impressive;
- The game is designed for three hours.
We will wait?
The developers do not call Adr1ft game and prefer the term " First -person game experience ". Perhaps this is justified: we are waiting for a three -hour installation in space. During this time, we must not only have time to solve simple puzzles, but also feel all the fragility https://gxmble-casino.co.uk/ of the surrounding world.