When you’re an unassuming software engineer occasionally sneaking peeks at the world from behind a blue-lit screen, anything excites. Even a blood-spattered device that looks nothing like the classic Casio digital.

I know this because I’ve been something of a computer engineer myself, three years this July actually, which is also when I picked up a pen and thought I’d rather spend time writing for/about games instead.

My point being that I’m pretty sure Albatross is at least as old as my freelance career. And through all this while I’ve been incessantly informed by Deeper Magic Co. on social that what they’re creating is a ‘cerebral cinematic side-scroller about time-travel, causation and death’.

Albatross is also the name of the underground research facility Stewart unwittingly finds himself in; as you’d imagine, the facility seems purposed for studies in space time and that bloody wrist watch in particular? That apparently takes you anywhere between 1984 and the future.

Now while I’d like to talk about how the John Snyder – Jonathan Snipes duo will be bringing together symphonies and synth-pop for an OST that you can work out/party to as per the developers’ claims, you’re perhaps more interested in the whole causality aspect of gameplay.

One thing the wrist watch is meant to help with is puzzle solving; this can be as simple as shifting between the present and 1984/the future to navigate steep drops, or hard enough to require multiple deaths on Stewart’s part.

The sci-fi mystery he’ll be combating meanwhile is said to be evocative of a few smiles, guffaws and tears, richly textured even, although at this point only one Dennis The Bat and a Hazmat-suited man have been revealed as narrative characters.

http://kck.st/2wMC1xY

With a background in film/TV entertainment that intends to make up for the ‘cinematic’ aspect of Albatross’ tagline, the intended 2019 release platforms are Steam, PlayStation, Xbox and Mobile.