Ripstone Games and Dan Smith have announced that the narrative-driven first-person puzzler, The Spectrum Retreat, is set to arrive on the Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, PS4 and PC later this year.
The game is about a mysterious guest who arrives at a equally mysterious hotel that resides just outside of the normal structures of humanity. While stationed at the getaway, players will be compelled to explore corridors and guest rooms at the spiffy Penrose hotel.
The objective is to unearth the mysteries and secrets that hide embedded in the walls and the very fabric of the hotel’s infrastructure. You’ll have to solve color-coded first-person puzzles, and explore a futuristic, art-deco environment while experiencing physics-based contraptions and other secrets that lie beneath the surface.
A debut trailer for the home console and PC release of The Spectrum Retreat was released, which you can check out below.
The concept of the game sounds very similar to the likes of Q.U.B.E. 2 or Perception or The Turing Test.
The Spectrum Retreat was originally in development as a prototype back in 2016 by then 18-year-old Dan Smith. Smith ended up joining up with Ripstone Games after winning a BAFTA award in 2016 for the demo.
In the press release, Smith explained…
“When I first began development, I couldn’t have anticipated that five years later we’d be releasing a game like this and that I would pick up a BAFTA along the way. The Spectrum Retreat is built on the mechanics I developed a few years ago, but they’re now integrated with a mature, absorbing story and setting. It’s been great to push the game further in every aspect and to craft an engaging world that can deliver the puzzles and story together.”
The thing is, we’ve seen these games come and go quite frequently, quite recently, and they attract a very specific kind of crowd unless they tap into something that attracts a broader audience. Fullbright managed to attract a sizable audience with Gone Home thanks to the press, while the Chinese Room’s Dear Esther became a sleeper hit due to being one of the very first walking sims. Firewatch‘s grounded and realistic story made it niche hit, while the existential fourth-wall breaking sim The Stanley Parable found an audience for being different to everything else on the market.
I don’t know if trippy visuals and physics-based puzzles will be enough to win over games with The Spectrum Retreat, but we’ll find out when the game launches for PC, PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch later this year.
