When You Think A Game Is Being Made Just For You

As crude and reductive as it can be, video games love to compare themselves to other video games. It’s the easiest way complex systems and settings can be conveyed to people who haven’t played (or maybe not even seen) something that’s still in development.

Sometimes, this can work against a game. If someone tells me a game is “like Diablo”, my brain will shut down in self defence; it’s only the art style that dragged me into Darkest Dungeon (and I still don’t know whether that’s a good thing or not).

Other times, it’s about the best piece of marketing a game can hope for. Witness Overland, a game with almost nothing to see other than some (admittedly pretty) art, but which is described by the devs as:

Overland is a tactical survival roadtrip game in which players protect and guide a changing cast of characters on a roadtrip across a hardly-recognisable America. An environmental catastrophe of incomprehensible proportions has permanently changed the earth as we know it. Players scavenge fuel and other supplies as they head directly into the heart of the cataclysm. Meet new people and leave them behind. Overland is the first internally-developed game under the Finji label, and draws on a variety of influences, from X-COM to Oregon Trail, Edward Hopper, and biomorphic abstraction, to create a completely new experience for desktop and tablets.

Having just seen (and really enjoyed) The Rover, this sounds like a very good time.

Course, it’d be a bit silly to get excited over just a description. The fact the game is coming from Finji, a studio that includes people like Canabalt’s Adam Saltsman and Shay Pierce, who worked on Hearthstone, also helps.

For a game we’ve seen almost nothing about, Overland is due on PC and mobile in “Q2 2015”.