Originally published at: https://statelyplay.com/2019/04/01/say-cheese-luca-redwood-set-to-release-photographs-this-week/
- iOS, Android, PC
Everyone loves games crafted from the mind of Luca Redwood and EightyEight Games. If you don’t, then you either haven’t played them or are a big ol’ doody-head. I mean, who couldn’t love You Must Build a Boat? There’s no option of building a boat, you MUST build it. Gold. Also, 1000000 which is a game I can never remember how many zeroes to add to it. Sure, they look like match-3 games, but delve into them and you’ll find they’re chock-full of deeper gameplay that belies their Bejeweled aesthetic.
On Wednesday, we’ll get to see his latest foray into our collective gamespace when EightyEight Games releases Photographs, a game most definitely unlike the previous two.
First of all, Photographs isn’t just one game, it’s actually five puzzle games all tied together with the theme of seemingly insignificant photos that end up marking important points in our characters’ lives. The game asks you to take a snap of a scene and then transitions to a puzzle that needs solving before the story continues via another Polaroid.
Unlike his previous games, Luca has decided to make the story the centerpiece here. Each vignette tells another tale and the puzzles themselves seem secondary to the world Luca’s put together. Eventually, all the disparate stories will coalesce into one, or so he tells us.
The game is divided into five distinct stories, set in five different times and locations, A player will learn how to solve progressively difficult puzzles in one story, and then move to the next story which has completely different gameplay.
That’s important because Photograph’s other big secret is that it’s not a puzzle game, it’s a narrative game. The dioramas, the photographs, the sound, the voices, and the puzzles, come together to create a cohesive narrative experience that tells that specific story.
I’ve been playing Photographs a bit over the weekend and hope to have my full review up on Wednesday right after it launches.