COLUMNAE Launches Kickstarter Campaign
COLUMNAE: A Past Under Construction, a Windows/Mac/Linux nonlinear point & click adventure game set in a post-apocalyptic steampunk world, has launched its Kickstarter campaign. The story of COLUMNAE is set more than a century after an environmental catastrophe made the air on the surface of the earth unbreathable, and the rich locked themselves up in Deus: a closed heavenly settlement built upon gigantic metal pillars called Columnae.
Beneath Columnae, a huge apparatus Machina was built to automatically extract underground resources and pump them up via pipes, through Columnae and into Deus. Trying to escape the lethal environment on the surface, those not wealthy enough settled in Columnae, where they now live by parasitizing on resources coming from Machina. Not only unable to enter Deus, but also unwilling to cooperate with people living on nearby Cliffs, the society of Columnae is plagued by corruption, political manipulation, power struggle and poverty.
COLUMNAE relies on classic point & click adventure mechanics, but also features a non–linear approach persistent throughout the gameplay, allowing a huge replayability. Additionally, we introduced a concept of retrocausality: chapters of the game are not played in chronological order, which allows the player to affect not only the future but also the past of the main character and the world surrounding him. Depending on the your actions within each chapter, yet-to-be-played chapters are placed in an appropriate “version” of the past or the future.
COLUMNAE is a story-driven game with classic point & click adventure elements such as puzzles and dialogues. In addition to these familiar mechanics, COLUMNAE introduces the concept of retrocausality which along with nonlinear nature of the gameplay allows the player to affect the future as well as the past of the story. The game is divided into eight chapters, but you won’t be playing them in a chronological order. The content of the currently played chapter is always the result of the choices made in all of the previously played chapters, and those choices will ultimately, (through one of the countless possible paths) lead to one of the eight completely different, world-changing endings.
You can find the game on Kickstarter here.