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GDC 2019: Luca Redwood’s ‘Photographs’ Wants to Trick People into Enjoying a Narrative Game

We’ve been talking about You Must Build a Boat developer Luca Redwood’s upcoming game Photographs for more than two years now, and as we learned last week it’ll finally be launching early next month. In light of this we sat down with Luca during GDC to get one final look at Photographs ahead of its release. Since this is a narrative-heavy puzzler, showing TOO much of the game and how certain puzzles are solved can dip into spoiler territory, so we checked out an early portion of the game which we had seen before as well as a portion of one of the later chapters just to get an idea of what we’re in for when Photographs launches.

Chatting with Luca after this demo was also very interesting as this has been a passion project of his for nearly four years. During its development he has frequently emphasized that this is a narrative game first and foremost, with puzzle elements weaved into the five different storylines. However, he does hope that those who don’t typically play games for their story will be drawn into Photographs by the puzzle aspects, and then will come to appreciate and become invested in the fairly “heavy" stories being told, and in a way prove to those people that compelling stories can be told through games. I think Photographs will be something quite special, so be sure to check it out when it launches on April 3rd and if you’re so inclined feel free to pre-order the game on the App Store right now.