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InSomnia is a diesel-punk MMO but you wouldn’t know it from this trailer

InSomnia Studio Mono

I’m not too sure what InSomnia is. I have a press release and a two minute long trailer in front of me but neither connect the dots completely. That’s part of the reason it’s so intriguing.

The other reason is it reminds me of Krater. Krater had its problems but its world wasn’t one of them. It looked like a lived-in wasteland, everything was built of scavenged parts and recycled pieces. InSomnia’s the first game since that looks to tap into that richly dirty style.

According to the press release InSomnia is “an ambitious Real-Time Tactical Online RPG currently scheduled for release on PC in late 2014.” Later in the release it says “InSomnia is a dedicated mission to produce an alternative to big-budget, creatively superficial MMO’s by developing a complex, multi-layered RPG taking place in genuine real-time, with a flexible character advancement system, original game mechanics, all set in a carefully constructed universe.”

So, InSomnia sounds like it’s an MMO of sorts. It may be of the Guild Wars model where you have access to a populated hub and then dive off into instances with a small party. That would fit with the game’s lore: the game “takes place on a gargantuan, half-deserted space station 400 years into its journey slowly making its way to an elusive planet known only as the Evacuation Point.”

That style of game might also explain why for an MMO trailer there’s remarkably few players ever in shot at any one time. It looks to be a pretty lonely game, otherwise.

There’s something else intriguing, too. The game’s world is “an enigmatic universe in which the visible realm is a veil behind which are hidden many layers of reality.” What does that mean exactly? Are we to dive off into meta worlds, further and deeper into our perceived reality, allowing for more primal versions of our existence to be explored? Or that there are invisible crates to be looted?

We’ll find out next year. (Hopefully before then if the developers open up a little.)