Phi Dinh, the indie developer out of Manchester, England, is working on an upcoming project called Recompile. It’s one part Portal, one part Tron, and one part Rez. The combination of puzzle-platforming with third-person shooting isn’t something we see often, but Dinh and the rest of the crew at Dear Villagers are helping bring Recompile to life on Steam in hopes of getting the game up and out by 2020 next year.

The game was officially announced by Dinh via a tweet on March 4th, 2019 as a birthday gift to himself as a surprise to the gaming community. The Steam store page was also made live, which features a basic rundown of the game’s plot.

The game is a single-player adventure that takes place within a digital world known as the Mainframe. You’ll need to find and put an end to a rogue entity that poses a risk to the entire world with an ecological disaster potentially hanging in the balance.

You can check out the gameplay trailer below to get an idea of what the gameplay is like.

It’s hard to put a game like Recompile into a simple categorical description since it branches out beyond the basic demarcation of an over-the-shoulder shooter, or a simple vertical-based platformer, or a 3D puzzle title.

You can definitely see a lot of different influences in the way the game is constructed, and it shows a lot of promise.

If I did have a criticism it’s that the skybox kind of blends with the general interactive environment, so that it feels like there’s very little contrast between the platforms and the skybox, other than the lights. I do, however, like that Recompile‘s main character is bright and glowing, along with the enemy constructs, so that you can definitely tell the active actors apart from the background.

The mulberry charcoal palette could use slightly more contrast so that the visual separation between the skybox and environment feels a little more distinct.

Otherwise, Recompile looks like a very interesting game. It will feature hacking, platforming, logic gates, three different difficulty levels, along with multiple endings depending on your play-style through the Metroidvania-style branching narrative system.

You can learn more about Recompile by checking out the Steam store page.