Chinese developer Fantablade has announced that their PlayStation 4 action sidescroller ICEY will release August 8. The announcement was made over at the PlayStation Blog, where the developer released a new trailer, and a bunch of great animated images of the game in action. In ICEY, players play the role of a character without a memory, and they can either obey or defy the mysterious narrator that is telling them what to do.
Here’s how Fantablade’s Mark Xiao explained the game over at the PlayStation Blog:
Icey is a side-scrolling action game. On the surface, players take on the role of a young girl with no memory, with only the voice of an omnipotent narrator to guide them through Ultimopolis on their quest to find Judas, a dangerous and powerful enemy.
Look deeper, however, and players are actually acting as themselves. Should they resist the narrator’s instructions and instead help Icey discover her own self-awareness?
It’s up to you, really. Do you prefer to see through Icey’s eyes and act as she would? Or do you prefer to remain “yourself” and see the world through your own eyes? Only you can decide what the real story is.
Check out the trailer below:
“If players were to enter Icey’s world and treat it as an action game, only to find that as early as the new player tutorial they could ignore the narrator’s directions, wouldn’t that be cool?” explained Xiao when describing how the team decided upon the narrator concept for the game. “Wouldn’t it be nice to feel that the narrator was actually a real person who could be resisted and annoyed? We showed a few of our classmates an early demo with these ideas, and their response was overwhelmingly positive. As a result, we moved forward with producing the full version of the game.”
Having the player either choose to embrace or resist a narrator is definitely an interesting concept for a game, and one that hasn’t been touched on a lot (although the games that have done so, such as The Stanley Parable and Klaus, did an excellent job with it). We’ll find out soon if ICEY can fulfill its potential as it releases for PlayStation 4 on August 8.
(Source: PlayStation Blog)
