Wreck Tangle Games’ Alaska is the hard wrought project borne of the sweet, blood and tears of a single developer. He’s been working on the game for quite some time and was proud to announce that this somewhat off-kilter first-person, murder-mystery shooter is currently available for purchase on Steam for PC.

The game is a unique hybrid of genres rolled into one – it’s the sort of game we don’t get very often and covers subject matter in a way that is almost never covered in a video game. You take on the role of Blake, recovering from a split with his wife. You’ll spend some time out in the Alaskan wilderness fishing, hunting, and exploring the icy tundra and snow-glazed forests that the great white north has to offer.

You’ll bide the pain that your emotions bring by engaging with the pristine zen of the outdoors. However, your zen gets rocked like your wife in the bed with the mailman while you were at work, when you discover that a murder has taken place out in the woods near your home.

Alaska centers around a close knit group of people living in the small town out and away from the rocky lifestyles of stress-inducing nausea brought about within the metropolitan chaos, and the fast-paced swirl of dizzying failures and out-of-reach successes that come with swinging around in the corporate infrastructure of the concrete jungle.

Nevertheless, even the seemingly meek and coy can still exercise the capabilities to commit murder.

Players will attempt to solve the crime before the crime comes to them.

As I mentioned, it’s a very interesting premise, combing NPC interactions and a story unfolded through a deep narrative, all while being able to partake in sandbox activities like chopping down trees, ice-skating, delivering mail and even starting a fire.

The mini-games are interspersed throughout the game as players walk around and talk to people, and the mix of slice-of-life gameplay with a murder-mystery is a cool way to get away from all the other traditional gameplay packages that seem to fit nicely within predefined categories and easily marketable genres.

It will be interesting to see how Wreck Tangle Games’ Alaska fares on the market. You can learn more by visiting the Steam store page, where the game is available for $7.99.