The team at Micropsia Games has spent nearly 3 years working on their new puzzle adventure game, The Watchmaker. While their effort appears to have paid off, they need help to finish the game. Micropsia has made it this far through personal savings and private investment, but they are rapidly running out of funds. Now, armed with a playable demo and roughly 70% of the game developed they have come to Kickstarter seeking $30,000.
The funding goal may seem on the low-side, but all of the work presented by the campaign appears top-notch. What began as a two person passion project has grown through years of hard work. Taking place in a stylized steampunk world, The Watchmaker combines innovative third-person, time-control mechanics, with challenging puzzles, and a mysterious narrative.
Players take on the role of Alexander, who has made it his life’s work to care for his precious clock tower. One day a mysterious voice notifies him that the tower has been sabotaged, throwing time itself out of wack. Now Alexander is aging rapidly, limiting the time he has left to find and repair the damage.
Time Isn’t On Your Side
Throughout the game, players must solve intricate puzzles using Alexander’s magnetic glove and time manipulation abilities. Every minute brings Alexander closer to old age and death. Just to keep things interesting some of the puzzle mechanisms are protected by aggressive guardians who will not welcome Alexander’s tinkering.
The campaign highlights several of its gameplay mechanics as well as Alexander’s time abilities through a series of gifs. The initial funding goal will allow Micropsia to release The Watchmaker on PC through their distributor, 1C Publishing. Console releases could become possible through stretch goals, but currently, the Fall 2017 PC release is the team’s primary goal.
The Watchmaker campaign has just begun, but it’s definitely one to keep an eye. It’s exactly the sort of project that crowdfunding could use more of.
This looks cool af! Awesome find. Definitely gonna pledge to this as soon as my current campaigns (Battle Princess Madelyn and Mages of Mystralia) wrap up. The only thing I don’t like is the character designs – they’re very angular. Seem like they’d work well in a short film (in fact, I’m getting a very “Ringling College of Animation and Design” vibe from this whole thing, which is generally awesome), but its just too angular and harsh to work as the player proxy that you’re going to be staring at for long periods of time. At least that’s my opinion. But that’s hardly a reason not to pledge to it – it just looks really cool 🙂
Try the demo before you pledge. It felt much less polished than the campaign lead me to believe.