Consortium was one of the oddest flawed gems to come out of the great Kickstarter boom, a first-person ‘immersive sim’ that wanted to be Deus Ex on a modern engine, with a small team and twice as many possible paths. It did well enough that developers Interdimensional Games think they can do it again, with the second part in a planned trilogy titled The Tower. In it you’ll land on the future-tech Churchill Tower in London circa 2040, and go about finding out why construction has been halted and what all these soldiers are doing here.
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It’s looking just as ludicrously ambitious and slightly wonky as Fraser found the original in his Consortium review, but there’s something very charming about what it’s trying to do. It’s also intriguing in that the universe is more than just the regular cyberpunk conspiracy gauntlet. Here’s the Kickstarter video, where they’re looking for 450,000 Canadian, which is around 300k USD or £219k.
There’s a darkness to all this I really like, something super creepy just on the edge of everything that’s happening. Animation and voice acting dodginess aside, it’s a really beautiful world I want to explore and understand the mysteries behind. Interdimensional also released a series of videos on YouTube that explain some more of these systems in depth. Here’s one on how the world will react to your different paths through the game:
These are fairly significant alternate paths, one removing you entirely from what I’d assume is the default structure of the game. Undertale just about managed to get that right in a basic 2D JRPG with stellar writing – this is a whole different ballvideogame, and pulling it off would be a hell of a feat.
Much more on the Kickstarter itself, naturally. 20 Canadian will get you a copy of the game (around $14 or just under £10), while reward tiers stretch all the way to 7,500 CAD for a fully voiced character of yourself in the game. It’ll be June 2017 before they even think they’ll be finished, if all goes well, so expect it late next year at the absolute earliest. They’ve already been working on it for some time though, as Jeremy found out when he interviewed them about Consortium: The Tower last year.