The puzzle game that PewDiePie himself deemed the ‘coolest puzzle game ever’ is making its way to the PS4, Vita, Wii U and PC this fall. Dreii is a collaborative physics conundrum and a first concept study of Dreii released in 2013 earned finalist status at both IGF and IndieCade 2014. After receiving such an overwhelming response, the Dreii team decided to push the concept of the game further and do something nobody else has managed so far.
“Dreii is all about connecting people. Once opening the game you will be secretly connected with all other players, in real time and across the globe. In the concept version this was only possible on specific devices. Being truly about uniting everybody we sat down with the people from all popular game platforms and talked to them about letting their players connect with the players from the rival platforms”, smirks game director Christian Etter.
“It took a lot of persuasion, but now we’re extremely happy to release Dreii on all seven major game platforms and let everybody play with each other – across different cultural and technical setups.”
Which means that by this autumn everybody downloading Dreii will be able to play together regardless of what device they’re using. For instance, a PS4 owner can sit next to Android user and battle logic and gravity united. A novel concept for an industry defined by harsh competition.
Bringing players from all continents together also means that there is need to communicate across all these different languages. Dreii, which won the European Design Award for its beautifully minimal design, owns a neat feature to bridge this gap. Mario von Rickenbach, the lead game maker of Dreii explains how it works:
“We settled on a hand-full of words that we thought would help to communicate with each other while completing the levels together. These words were translated into 19 different languages. From Hindi to Spanish. We even included an old Swiss language lying at the brink of extinction with only 40,000 speakers left worldwide. This simple but effective system allows everybody to communicate fastly and intuitively, without having to know each other’s languages.”
Next to the universal communication tool there are a number of new features in Dreii for which there wasn’t enough time while developing the initial concept study. The game, which was honoured with the Swiss Game Award, will feature faster physics, brand new levels, as well as a new character specifically designed for Dreii.
