Note: Since time of writing, the name of the game has been changed to Yesterday.

Spanish developer Pendulo Studios has until now been creating comical adventures like the Runaway trilogy and The Next BIG Thing. That is about to change. During the gamescom in Cologne this year, they announced they are working on a new title called Y: The Case of John Yesterday. Josué Monchan, one of Pendulo's designers, explained how after ten years of Runaway they felt like doing something completely different for their next project. From what we saw in a short presentation and the first teaser trailer, this game will indeed be something else entirely: a horror/mystery thriller that's squarely aimed at a mature audience.

Y begins in New York, where a number of homeless people have been disappearing. When their bodies are found, it is clear that they have been burned alive. A few people who happened to be in the general vicinity where these murders occurred only report having heard someone whistling a haunting melody. The police aren't in the least interested in the case, as they reason that the less homeless 'scum' the better. At the same time, Y-shaped scars mysteriously appear on the palms of several seemingly unrelated people. Are the two events connected, and if so, how?



Henry White, the son of a millionaire who works for a charity fund, does care about the missing homeless people and wants to find out who is killing them, so he visits a deserted metro station along with his very strong friend Cooper. We were shown two puzzles at this location, one involving Henry improvising a lockpick to open a padlock and one where Cooper retrieves a weapon from across a chasm by using sheer force rather than wit. Henry and Cooper are not the only two playable characters, however, as another is amnesiac John Yesterday, who gets drawn in against his will and has to find out not only who is behind the killings but also why he has lost his memory. We were told the puzzles will be typical Pendulo challenges, and there will be an extensive hint system as well as a hotspot highlighter. There are six chapters in total, and when restarting the game a summary of what’s happened so far is available.

The gameplay will be interspersed with many flashbacks of memory fragments. For instance, when Cooper finds a Boy Scout badge he is taken back to his childhood when he was a Scout himself. There we’ll learn that he was abused, called stupid and was told to toughen up, which he did. He is now a football player and is scared of nothing and no-one, but he also suffers from violent fantasies. In this way we really get to know the characters in the game, providing important insight into their psyches and the reasons they do things. An underlying theme of the game will also be finding out why the people at the edge of society ended up where they are. They used to be people like you and me, so what happened to them and why are they now homeless and desperate?

The adventure includes more than 30 hand-drawn locations ranging from dirty old tunnels under New York to a beautiful mountain range in Tibet and some slums in Paris. Although at first glance the cartoony graphic style seems typical for Pendulo, it is much darker than their previous games. Many of the settings are derelict and dirty, and generally give off an unpleasant, unwelcoming atmosphere. We saw several scenes and there seems to be no shortage of blood, mystical symbols like pentagrams, and instruments of torture, so this is certainly not a game for the squeamish. Right at the beginning we see what looks like a wall full of pictures of victims and crime scenes, with arrows connecting them and all kinds of scribblings in between. Is it red ink or blood? In the background we hear a woman screaming. The developers weren’t kidding; this definitely isn’t Runaway.

What makes Y really stand out, though, is the frequent use of graphic novel-style panels that pop up (or 'blow up' as Josué calls it) when performing such actions as looking at an item or talking to other people. Instead of viewing a conversation from a distance, you can really see emotions and facial expressions from a close-up viewpoint, complete with speech bubbles of the kind found in comics. Cutscenes also appear in a 'box' or move across the screen in sequential panels. These fragmented cinematics and extensive use of panels should help maintain tension by constantly surprising the player and keeping the tempo high, making you feel like something unexpected could be around the next corner.

The game will be released in Germany in the spring of 2012, with an English release hopefully not long after that, though no publishing plans have yet been announced. As surprising as Pendulo’s sudden and totally unexpected switch to the horror-mystery subgenre was to me, I am certainly excited about this game. What I saw looked very impressive both graphically and narratively, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it all works out in the long run.