The Lost Pisces may have just launched on Kickstarter for Xbox One and PC, but as a follower of indie teams, I’m quite surprised to see it finally on the crowdfunding site. Originally, Sirenum Digital had planned a Kickstarter years ago! For various reasons though they’ve had to continue pushing the date back, until today. So, let’s go over the pitch and project which have been years in the making. The game is a reimagining of the classic Hans Christian Andersen “The Little Mermaid.” Although it may look fairly like a gorgeous, if typical action adventure, the main focus is actually on communicating with your AI partner, Pisces.
This is done by utilizing the current model Kinect and serves as the real push of The Lost Pisces‘ entire campaign. Basically, the Kinect will read the player’s facial expressions and interpret them. Once your “mood” is read, Pisces will react accordingly with her own emotive responses. Of course, the question remains if this technology is sophisticated enough to perceive slight emotional reactions, or if players will really need to force a certain look to be read as happy, sad, or mad.
Although The Lost Pisces is doing something quite unique, gamers have definitely become pretty annoyed with the Kinect. After all, their extreme displeasure got Microsoft to reverse Xbox One’s “required” Kinect functionality! Because of that, as well as the Kickstarter funding goal of $204,000 I am not sure how well The Lost Pisces will do. I’m afraid that this is one instance where waiting to “perfect” your product is not for the better.
Track the progress of the Lost Pieces Kickstarter in our Campaign Calendar.
