Orten Was the Case to open in 2023

0 Comments

Announcements by Jack Allin
Published:

Hand-painted time-looping mystery by It Takes Two’s lead animator unveiled for PC and consoles

Groundhog Day is a celebration named after a burrowing underground critter, though it's arguably more famous for the time-looping Bill Murray movie of the same name. Woodhill Interactive's upcoming Orten Was the Case mixes a little of both in its subterranean repeating-day mystery coming next year.

The game is set in the titular fictional Stockholm suburb – or more accurately, underneath it. Players assume control of Ziggy, a "simple guy in his early teens with no highflying ambitions whatsoever." Ziggy's life gets a whole more complicated when he awakens "after a blackout, seemingly clueless of what has happened," only to soon realize that he's caught in a time loop. Guiding the hapless protagonist, your only way to figure out what happened and how to break free is to "make your way down the deepest caves and tunnels below Orten" and seek answers to "millenia-old mysteries" that led to this event. But beware, as the deeper you go, "not only answers will await you..."

Created by Oskar Thuresson, the lead animator of It Takes Two, and drawing on his personal experiences growing up in Sweden, Orten Was the Case is a stylishly hand-painted "lore-driven detective/puzzle adventure game" that features a variety of "local settings and graffiti culture." To progress you'll need to do a little light platforming and "solve puzzles, find hidden passages, collect clues and talk to the inhabitants of Orten." But this is no static adventure, as events play out in real time and the NPCs you encounter will dynamically go about their business, doomed to forever follow the exact same loop each day "unless you can change the outcome of things."

Those interested in participating in an invite-only beta playtest can register on Steam right now, with testing continuing until November 11th. For everyone else, we'll need to wait for the finished version of Orten Was the Case when it arrives on Windows PC and consoles sometime in 2023.