Somerville is "a blockbuster project, on its side"

Former Playdead founder Dino Patti has started Jumpship with indie Chris Olsen (with a background in animation) to take the latter's Somerville project to new heights. We sat down with the duo at Gamelab to try and pry some information out of them.

"Since I left Playdead I've been looking for the next thing to do," says Patti. And when I saw Somerville I instantly fell in love with it and I contacted Chris and we spoke for around a half year about the game and so on. At one point we decided, and I decided, I want to help this become a reality and luckily Chris felt the same."

While development on Somerville started fairly openly with a devlog, it has since "gone dark", and the duo stayed fairly mum on exactly what the game will be like.

"It's touted as a sci-fi action-adventure," says Olsen. "It's a very vague term. The biggest problem with the sort of one line pitch for a game is that mechanically, it's all relying on the mechanics, right so at the moment we're seeing a lot of genre-bending as well, mechanically. I didn't want to be locked down in any way to certain tropes that we're going to be using, but in terms of the vibe of the project it appeals to both me and Dino's sense of wanting to be at least intrigued with something and feel like we've been shown too much. It's kind of the culture that we have at the start, it's kind of convenient as well in not giving too much away about it. But it is a blockbuster project, on its side and we're going to be playing with tropes of that kind of genre."

Clearly, Somerville is unlike Dino Patti's previous work that includes Limbo and Inside.

"What I fell in love with was I could see there was a talent behind it, and I could see a person who understood composition and colour and so on," said Patti. "To me it's been refreshing to start thinking about sci-fi and other mechanics than the ones we worked with on Limbo and Inside."

Below is the brief teaser for Somerville released the other day.