For a story featuring time travel so prominently, A New Beginning has sure kept us waiting a while. It was meant to be Daedalic Entertainment’s debut title back in 2008, and its climate change theme got it lots of media attention at the time. Global warming isn’t dominating headlines quite as much these days, but the game is still highly anticipated and seems to finally be nearing release. At this year’s gamescom, Daedalic’s PR manager Claas Paletta gave me a brief look at what’s in store.

You might be familiar with the basic story outline from our previous preview. In the year 2500, climate change has caused widespread natural disasters, making the planet increasingly uninhabitable. Humanity is on the brink of extinction, and with all other options exhausted, a team of crack scientists has been working on a last resort: time travel. The plan is for several people to travel back in the hopes of preventing climate change from ever striking in its most disastrous form. This much is shown in the introduction.

For the first playable part, the story then shifts to a different angle. It is present day, and unsuspecting retired scientist Bent Svensson is trying to repair a broken generator. The interface is similar to The Whispered World and also uses a verb coin, but in this case a context-sensitive one, featuring “look at” and up to three other verbs specific to the hotspot. Among other reasons, this is to evoke a more serious feel. No funny lines for trying to talk to everything, but you can do such things as open and close hatches and try to climb trees.

The introductory puzzle is a simple enough matter of finding the right spare parts, and is meant to slowly immerse you in the story. As you walk around and examine the scenic surroundings of Bent’s secluded home in the Norwegian wilderness, you discover bits and pieces of his backstory. Long before retiring, Bent was an idealist who thought his inventions would solve the world’s energy problems one day. The most promising one was a revolutionary method of using blue-green algae to synthesize hydrogen, which would be able to cut down enormously on pollution. Sadly, there were forces at work that kept him from succesfully taking it to the wider market and changing the world. He subsequently got ever more lost in his work and estranged from his family, friends and coworkers, and ended up with next to nothing. Eventually the people around him pushed him into retirement and convinced him to give up his idealism for his own good.

But all of that is about to change. Just when you’ve finished the first puzzle, the time traveler Fay arrives at the scene. After some introductions, she tells Bent that she has come specifically looking for him, that his earlier idealism was right and that his blue-green algae technology can in fact save the world. And to top it off, she admits she knows this because she is from the future. Bent is obviously reluctant to simply take her word for it, so what follows is a long conversation in which Fay explains the situation and everything she’s been through since starting her trip through time.

From that point on, the player experiences that story as Fay, in what will take up approximately a third of the game. This takes place in the year 2050, the ill-fated target of their first time jump. There they discover that the world is already in the throes of catastrophic climate change and well beyond saving. Worse still, much of Fay’s team is lost, leaving her alone after a second jump to our time to seek Bent by herself. This narrative is occasionally interrupted by comments from Bent, pointing out irregularities and details he finds hard to believe.

After sharing her story, Fay succeeds in convincing Bent to help out, and they set out to make that world-saving technology a success after all, a journey that will take them all the way from a research station on an exhausted oil rig to the jungles of the Amazon. But their task will not be easy. There is only one prototype left, and it’s at risk of falling into the hands of the shady energy mogul Emilio Indez. Whatever his own ambitions, they won’t help the world out much, and so it’s up to Bent and Fay to somehow prevent him from carrying out his destructive plans. I didn’t see enough of the game to form a firm impression of this “eco-thriller”, but the theme is certainly topical, and the stakes are established very tangibly early on, so it’s not hard to feel the urgency behind the quest at hand.

The game’s visual style is quite something else, and there is a striking contrast between the environmentally-ravaged vistas of the future and the as-yet-unspoiled present day scenes. The art is 2D throughout and completely hand-drawn, and the easiest way to describe much of it would be “European graphic novel”. I’m not just referring to the high quality, or even the slightly stylized way the backgrounds are drawn, though certainly it applies to both. But beyond those, the cutscenes themselves are mostly made up of what look like animated comic book panels, with the larger ones featuring dramatic angles. The effect really needs to be seen rather than described, so even if you don’t understand German at all, the trailer below will give you a better idea of how it comes together in action. The main menu is similarly composed of comic-like panels.



Sadly, the game is similar to The Whispered World in that it cannot take full advantage of modern displays to show all that splendor. People with a widescreen monitor will have to tolerate black sidebars, as A New Beginning only runs in an effective 4 x 3 with a highest available resolution of 1024x768. These are consequences of the long development time and the hand-drawn art used throughout the game. Claas told me Daedalic will deal with this issue in future games, but it wasn’t doable for this one.

The music was impossible to make out over the noise at gamescom, but the soundtrack CD Daedalic handed out gives a good impression. It contains over 40 minutes of generally excellent music featuring all live instruments, often deep and dramatic. Provided they manage to use it appropriately in-game, this bodes well. English voices were not available at all in the demo, so I can’t comment on the voice acting.

If all goes well, the English version of A New Beginning will come out in the UK through Lace Mamba Global in March 2011. Daedalic is still in talks with distributors about a North American release, and hope to launch it there in early 2011 as well. Though I didn’t see much of it, A New Beginning strikes me as having great potential due to its impressive visual design and mature environmental themes that seem more than capable of providing a relevant backdrop for a compelling adventure. Hopefully it won’t be much longer until we find out if it was all worth the wait.