Pandora: Purge of Pride is a Victorian-styled first-person puzzle game by up-and-coming development studio High Class Kitsch. Their Kickstarter project has a deadline of 31 May 2013 and with $1,533 already pledged by 64 backers at the time of writing, they’re heading for success.
The title itself has already been provisionally scheduled for release on PC and Mac in June, with the developer now just needing to polish a few pieces of art and ensure all of their puzzles make sense. The Kickstarter entry is intended to help cover the cost of their software and other fees such as marketing – and here at 1001-Up.com we thought we’d give them a hand. We became official backers this month because we’re always looking to help out smaller projects with great potential.
Pandora: Purge of Pride is set in Victorian England and is based around the story of the namesake’s box. Players take on the role of Pandora, 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. Corresponding powers are gained along the way; for example, capturing Greed enables you to pull objects towards you while Lust attracts two items to one another. The developer teases by saying that Pride is the last of the Sins and ‘can truly consume people’, so it sounds like they’re going to pull something sneaky out of the box (pun intended).
The game features puzzles with adaptive difficulty levels so they’re never too easy or hard, and we’re looking forward to seeing how this works in practice. The gothic hand-painted art-style really suits the Victorian theme and the painting of Pandora displayed in the mansion looks lovely; the promotional video doesn’t show very much of the game at all, but a separate gameplay trailer is available and lots of screenshots can be found on the game website.
High Class Kitsch was formed by four Interactive Media and Game Development students from Massachusetts when Ryan Casey, Mike Frankfort, Jill Sauer and Alex Thornton-Clark teamed up to complete their Major Qualifying Project at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. They used Pandora’s proof of concept stage to complete their assignment and have since been hard at work turning it into an actual game.
The developers are hoping to achieve a fundraising goal of a modest $5,000 by the end of the month. Pandora: Purge of Pride is looking like it will provide a unique experience in a world of physics-based puzzle games, like a cross between Amnesia: The Dark Descent and The 7th Guest. Head on over to the project page at Kickstarter and give them your support.
