Atomhawk Design and Lantern Interactive’s joint project for the beautiful adventure The Realm has a funding deadline of 22 May 2013 on the Kickstarter website. They’ve already received £35,969 from 1,636 backers, and after watching the gorgeous teaser trailer we can see why their concept is proving so popular.
Obvious from the size of our adventure category, we’re pretty big fans of the genre here at 1001-Up.com. So when we stumbled across The Realm’s stunning 2D and 3D artwork on Kickstarter we couldn’t stop ourselves from becoming official backers. The game is described as “an imaginative reinvention of the point & click adventure genre” and the developers are aiming to bring it up-to-date so it can be played just as easily on touchscreen devices as with a mouse.
Set in the distant future in a world reclaimed by nature and steeped in myth, the game follows a headstrong young girl named Sarina. She leaves the safety of her village to go on a quest to discover a cure for her sick mother and along the way she meets Toru, a giant stone golem (kind of makes us think of Majin and the Foresaken Kingdom). Together the unlikely pair travel across the forest of Nimrick to recover a flower with amazing healing properties but a shadowy force is reawakened by their presence: the mysterious Lampheads, man-eating plants with a deadly gaze.
Players control both Sarina and Toru, and must make best use of their unique abilities in order to progress. The heroine is smart and nimble but is vulnerable to many natural hazards and creatures found in the world; and the lovable giant is slow and easily distracted, but has a whole lot of power and can learn new skills from Sarina.
Calling their style ‘Western Art, Eastern Heart’, the developers’ fantasy art is influenced by creators such as Hayao Miyazaki. The locations in The Realm reflect the real-life landscapes and architecture of north east of England and it’s lovely to see what looks like the Tyne Bridge in the background of one of the shots for the promotional video.
Atomhawk Design and Lantern Interactive showed The Realm to the usual publishers and, even though they all loved the concept, they weren’t able to provide funding for this type of game. The developers even travelled to Game Connection in Paris last year to test their concept on the industry but despite being picked for the ‘Selected Projects’ event, nobody was willing to invest in an adventure. That just goes to show the short-sightedness of some publishers – not all of their customers want to play titles full of violence and blood – but I guess that’s a discussion for another time.
The developers are looking to achieve a fundraising goal of £195,000 by 22 May 2013 in order to complete the game by February 2014. Unfortunately, Kickstarter users based in the US often don’t back UK projects so we need as many people as possible to get behind them! It’s a beautiful-looking adventure game, with a strong female protagonist, from a team with a long list of achievements – we can’t see any reason not to head on over to Kickstarter and back The Realm.
