First clues unraveled for sci-fi puzzle adventure Strand

• Announcements by Jack Allin
• Published:

Time-looping mystery aboard a futuristic space station coming to PC on Steam in 2025

At the best of times, survival in space requires just about everything going right. But where's the fun in that? Fortunately for players – but less so for the lone remaining survivor in Exnilo Studio's upcoming Strand – you can count on just about everything going wrong instead.

In the 25th century, humanity has been united in a "speculative vision of ideal technological advancement, filled with both inspiration and unease." Exploratory space probes far beyond Earth's own solar system have uncovered a potential new world for colonization, called VESTA, a "paradise covered with vast oceans and thriving plankton." A team of five researchers aboard the A.R.E.S. (Astral Research Experimental Station) are sent into orbit around the planet to study it, but "when a powerful magnetic field hits A.R.E.S., the station is warped by mysterious phenomena, distorting time, space, and physics." The crew begin disappearing one by one until only the "messy, brilliant" doctor and writer Miranda Vigneau remains, caught in an infinite time loop that depends on a limited energy supply. To escape it and discover what happened to Miranda's colleagues, players must strategically manage their energy use, solve "mind-bending puzzles" and confront the questions that inevitably arise about "humanity’s role in the vast, unforgiving universe."

Presented in crisp, first-person, free-roaming 3D, Strand takes place entirely aboard the A.R.E.S. The environments promise to be highly interactive, as "nearly every object can be inspected, and some will hold vital information." Clues can be either physical or digital, the latter downloaded via a neural device that survives each time reset, and the many challenges you face will involve "all types of thinking processes, putting your mechanical, anthropological, and critical reasoning skills to the test." The learning curve is intended to be forgiving for inexperienced players, while "additional challenging puzzles will be available" for veterans of the genre. Along the way you'll uncover details about your former crewmates with whom you once "lived, researched, and struggled together." They've all left behind "fragments of their stories" to find in "personal journals, emails, and audio recordings" that detail both "their triumphs and darkest moments." Only by piecing them together will you come to "understand the strange phenomena affecting the station, and use them to your advantage as you plot your escape from A.R.E.S." But as you explore, you must also "confront the double-edged nature of progress," which offers "incredible potential, but at what cost?"

There is no firm target release date for Strand, but the game is due to launch on Steam sometime in 2025 for Windows PC, with requests for playtest access open now to the public. In the meantime, the indie French-Canadian development duo offer additional insight in this video presentation, and you can follow their blog to learn more about it in the coming months.

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