During GDC 2016 just about a year ago, Austrian developer Broken Rules demoed their new game called Old Man’s Journey to me, and it absolutely blew my mind. It was a painfully charming adventure about guiding an old man through various environments as he reflected on his life, and you did this by sliding the various background elements around in order to create a path for the old man to journey on. It’s real tricky to explain. Unfortunately, the game was in too rough of shape to talk about publicly around GDC time, so I just kind of tucked the demo into my brain somewhere and hoped to be able to talk about the game at some point in the future. The following July, the developers officially announced the game with a brief teaser, which did a great job at showing off the charm of Old Man’s Journey but still didn’t quite explain exactly how the game worked. Well, I’m very excited that today Broken Rules have unveiled a brand new gameplay trailer for Old Man’s Journey and you can finally see how the actual game itself works without me fumbling to try and explain it. Enjoy!
As you can (finally) see in this trailer, you’ll be manipulating the environment to create walkable paths for the old man, and one big change I’ve noticed since the last time I saw this game is how the edges of the moveable environmental pieces actually highlight to let you know you can move them. Previously the game didn’t have that function, and you’d just kind of poke around at stuff to see what moved, and I think what’s shown in this new trailer is a much more elegant solution to that. Additionally, as the developers describe, “By uncovering the old man’s story told through beautiful vignettes of his memories, players will experience his heartache, regret and hope, coupled with inquisitive, pressure-free, and engaging puzzle solving." Broken Rules has also announced that Old Man’s Journey is being funded by Indie Fund, and that it’s been nominated for an IGF award for Excellence in Visual Arts. Old Man’s Journey is scheduled for release sometime in 2017, and we’ll definitely be talking more about this one in the coming months.
