I do have a liking for games involving massive medieval castles, moody old mansions and the like. This much I cannot deny. So in that regard, The Eyes of Ara was the perfect game to grab my attention, considering it takes place in – you guessed it – a moody old castle. Quite a gorgeous-looking one, too, if the screenshots and videos are anything to go by. In any case, the project – recently having been funded on Kickstarter – is very much an adventure game in the vein of the Myst series. According to its basic premise, something unknown and unexpected has awoken within the walls of a lone castle, and you head off to investigate, uncovering the story and solving plenty of puzzles along the way. And take the “uncover” part quite seriously, as The Eyes of Ara is going to tell it story organically, through interaction with the environment, as opposed to purely cutscenes and character dialogue. The campaign set out to amass an initial 15,000 dollars and managed to do just that, though it didn’t quite collect enough for additional stretch goals – those would have added extra chapters to the game. Either way, a success is still a success.
The Eyes of Ara is expected to be released sometime next year, first on PC and Mac, with mobile and tablet versions arriving later on.
