Earlier this month, we wrote about High Class Kitsch’s project for the Victorian-styled first-person puzzler Pandora: Purge of Pride. The Kickstarter campaign for this unique game is due to finish on 31 May 2013 and, with 84% funding from 138 backers already, it looks on track to succeed.
We became official backers for Pandora: Purge of Pride because we’re always on the lookout for smaller projects that have potential – that and the fact that it made us think of a cross between Amnesia: The Dark Descent and The 7th Guest. Besides, P-Diddy was rather taken with the in-game portrait of the title’s namesake (there’s a screenshot below if you want to check her out).
For those who don’t already know, the game is set in Victorian England and is based around the story of Pandora’s box. Players take on the role of the heroine, a naïve woman who has unknowingly unleashed the Seven Deadly Sins on her mansion, and puzzles must be solved in order to recapture the evils and stop them from spreading. Below is a video released by the developers a couple of weeks ago showing off their physics based gameplay.
High Class Kitsch is based in Massachusetts, the first team to start developing software there to their knowledge, and this is exactly the reason why they chose to start their studio. In a recent update to backers they said: “One of the long term goals of High Class Kitsch is to set up a place for indies to come and work in Worcester. That’s why we need to get Pandora off the ground. It will not only let us continues working on our own games, but it will let other indies do the same thing.”
In order to see their project hit its target, they have re-evaluated its stretch goals to make sure the title is ‘as good as possible for as many gamers as possible’. At $7,500, controller and Linux support will be investigated; and at $20,000 and $40,000 respectively, Occulus Rift and PS Vita support will be considered, as the team will then have the resources to make their game work on even more devices.
But with only $4,220 out of a modest $5,000 goal achieved already and just four days remaining on the clock, these stretch goals look a little way off. We’ve noticed that there doesn’t seem to be much online regarding the game other than what High Class Kitsch have put out their themselves, and only six backers have left comments on the Kickstarter page. The developers may need to engage further with websites, bloggers and backers in order to spread the word and give their project the boost it requires.
Pandora: Purge of Pride is scheduled for release on 11 June 2013 for PC and Mac, following the end of the Kickstarter campaign on 31 May 2013.
