The New Studio Will Be Called Jumpship
Dino Patti, ex-CEO and co-founder of Inside and Limbo developer, Playdead, left the studio last July. Since then, he has helped to start a new studio called Jumpship that’s based in UK along with another developer, Chris Olsen. The first official reveal of the fruit of their collaboration will be called Somerville.
They dropped a quick teaser that doesn’t give away much except for setting and atmosphere.
While the studio is new, luckily, this newly announced game has been in development for a few years as early as 2014 from the info I was able to dig up on their Tumblr. Thus, the team had been making the game before Patti’s departure, but it’s good to see they’ve brought him on as this game certainly has shades of Playdead to it in that it looks like an atmospheric narrative-heavy 2D game.
That said, the developers’ Tumblr page reveals that this Somerville is a departure from Playdead’s style of gameplay as the main character (who looks like The Last of Us‘s Joel) can wield a gun. Furthermore, the devs shared some other combat include activating a force field to bounce off enemy lasers. The main character appears to pick up a knife and puts it away in one GIF. Lastly, the main enemies appear to be TRON-glowy lizard aliens and futuristic drones.
No release date or word on what platform Somerville will be on, but we’ll keep this space updated when more information comes to the surface.