Before this week, David O'Reilly was best known in the gaming scene for making the pretty-looking futuristic video games in the recent science fiction film Her. Sadly, none of them were actually playable for anyone other than Joaquin Phoenix's character in that movie. But now O'Reilly has returned with a playable video game that's just as off-beat and quirky as his fictionalized work: a mountain simulator.
Yes, you read that right. Mountain, as its name suggests, is a game about being a mountain.
And no, that doesn't mean you'll be playing as The Mountain from Game of Thrones. That would certainly be awesome (or horrifying, depending on how you felt about that infamous episode). But let's be honest: that kind of Mountain Simulator has already been done. It's called God of War.
How does this compare to games that let you simulate other, slightly more animated subjects like, say, goats? Here's the wonderfully deadpanned feature list:
- no controls
- automatic save
- audio on/off switch
- time moves forward
- things grow and things die
- nature expresses itself
- ~ 50 hours of gameplay
- once generated, you cannot be regenerated
Alternatively to "mountain simulator," O'Reilly also describes Mountain as a "relax 'em up" or "art horror" game.
I'm really hoping that Mountain turns out to be something like Ed Key's soothing open-world experience Proteus, a game that he's described as a stripped-down version of Skyrim that abandons quests in favor of letting you sit back and admire the scenery. Judging by the first batch of visually stunning images, it certainly looks like it has a lot of potential:
To contact the author of this post, write to yannick.lejacq@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter at @YannickLeJacq.