Past and Present Collide in Ira

[dropcap size=big]C[/dropcap]urrently running on Kickstarter with only a couple weeks left is a science-fiction point-and-click adventure game with a unique art style called Ira. In it, you’ll play as the titular character through three different time periods in order to solve a mystery surrounding Ira and a doomed expedition beyond our solar system. At least, that’s more or less what the pitch gives us. The good people at Ore Creative were kind enough to offer a short demo of the game in order to whet our appetites. And while it only takes about half an hour to play through, it does give us a good cross-slice of what to expect with the final game once released.

The Ira demo starts off in the “past” zone where a younger Ira is at home with his parents helping his father tune up a truck and getting it to work. And his mother bedridden. Presumably sick, but she claims that she’s just tired. It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out that she’s not all that well despite her assurances to the contrary. And when asked about it, his father dodges the question and has Ira run off on an errand to get a hose for the car’s engine.

Despite his concerns, Ira does his chores without complaining. After helping in the garage, and being suitably spooked by noises in the nearby barn, he heads into the house proper to help his mother with the cooking of supper. Taking a short break to watch some television in the den, he wanders into the kitchen to put the pot on the stove. This is where things get more than a bit eerie and take on a more sinister tone. Ira starts heading back to the garage to tell his father that dinner’s ready but reality starts to shift to more ominous surroundings. Both his parents are gone and so is the car and the house is stripped bare of pretty much everything.

Then he heads on up to the attic where he finds a solitary Victrola and a puppet stage in the far corner underneath the lone window. Approaching it, reality warps once again, this time on a much more surreal scale. What amounts to a show of paper pieces of varying shapes and sizes moving about telling a timelapsed tale towards the present.

You see, “present” Ira is an astronaut, sent on a mission with others to solve the mystery of a missing expedition lost years previously. It appears that something quite wrong happened and he’s the lone survivor of his team. Trying to figure out what went wrong, he activates a lone console and converses with the ship’s AI. Unfortunately, the ship springs a massive leak and Ira is forced to take action. Which, quite appropriately, is where the demo ends.

In just this very short tease we already get a good glimpse into the workings of Ira, both the man and game. The art style is certainly a unique one for an adventure game, but as I like to say graphics aren’t what make the game but rather a good story and memorable characters. While there’s not much to glean from the full game, it does look like a promising addition to the genre.