If there’s one developer that really brought their A-game to GDC this year, I think the award might go to Daedalic Entertainment. We’ve already seen some awesome previews from the show for The Night of the Rabbit and the dark and grisly RPG Blackguards, and now I’m starting to lose count of all the great new games that Daedalic has on the horizon! Next up from the adventure game connoisseur is a new prison break-themed adventure called 1954 Alcatraz.
If there’s one developer that really brought their A-game to GDC this year, I think the award might go to Daedalic Entertainment. We’ve already seen some awesome previews from the show for The Night of the Rabbit and the dark and grisly RPG Blackguards, and now I’m starting to lose count of all the great new games that Daedalic has on the horizon! Next up from the adventure game connoisseur is a new prison break-themed adventure called 1954 Alcatraz.
In the game, you play as a prisoner named Joe who is doing 40 years of hard time in Alcatraz for an armed robbery. Back at home in San Francisco, Joe’s wife, Christine, doesn’t have it so easy either. A gangster named Mickey has threatened to kill Christine when she refuses to give up the location of “the swag,” which I only assume to be the money that Joe stole in his robbery. Now Joe finds himself in a race to recover the loot that’s hidden somewhere in the North Beach area: but if he’s going to beat Mickey to it, he has to break out of “The Rock” first!
In a world of drug deals, blackmails, and homicide, the player’s decisions in the game will directly influence the fate of each character, as the Daedalic website promises “different plots, surprising turns and alternative endings await the players.”
1954 Alcatraz is set to feature 90 hand-painted locations based on San Francisco, North Beach, and Alcatraz; over 20 3D-animated characters; and an atmospheric soundtrack by Pedro Macedo Camacho, whose impressive resume includes writing the musical scores for Fairytale Fights and Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island. The puzzles and dialogue in 1954 Alcatraz were also penned by Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island co-writer Gene Mocsy. Not much else is known about the game right now, but a handful of released screenshots so far show a few of the environments you’ll encounter in the game, in that gorgeous cartoony art style that one would expect from the makers of the Deponia series.
1954 Alcatraz is currently set for a PC release sometime in 2013, and we can expect to hear a more exact date confirmed in the next few weeks. I’m most interested to see how Daedalic incorporates the use of 3D animated characters on top of the beautiful hand-illustrated locations, so here’s to hoping that we also see a trailer of the gameplay’s final build somewhere in that time!
