Gamescom round-up: The Thought Saved for Last, Mission: Bielany II

The Thought Saved for Last

After making freeware titles like Frantic Franko: A Bergzwerg Gone Berserk and Snakes of Avalon, one-man Polish developer Igor Hardy is now working on his first commercial title, The Thought Saved for Last. Most of the hand-drawn presentation is still to be finished, but at gamescom Igor showed a rough demo and explained the innovative ideas behind the game.

The protagonist is a man who is trying to catch a bus home after a long day’s work. He runs towards the bus stop at the edge of a forest, only to see the last bus just driving off in the distance. With time to kill until the next one, he decides to sit down and wait, but weird things start happening around him. The plantlife, the lantern, even the shadows begin acting almost sentient, reacting to the protagonist, and the paths prove unreliable, as whenever he tries to walk away, he keeps getting lost in the woods and finds himself unable to escape.

This starts affecting his mind, and the player can look inside the man’s brain and see it consists of various compartments. You will also notice it’s shrinking. The goal is to keep managing his thoughts, connecting them and influencing which thought he hangs onto the longest by moving them to different layers. This is done through a strategic management interface screen that resembles a rule-based board game, but rather than being a standalone casual-style minigame, Hardy compares the concept to the complex inventory interface of Return to Mysterious Island, which was manipulated separately but was fully integrated with the actual adventure.