First details put suburban deduction puzzler City of Voices on the map

• Announcements by Jack Allin
• Published:

A "detective game about friendship" from the co-designer of Rise of the Golden Idol coming to PC early next year

Mysteries come in all shapes and sizes, and deduction puzzlers popularized by games like Return of the Obra Dinn and The Case of the Golden Idol can be solved by anyone (even ducks) with a keen attention to detail. We'll soon have need to apply our powers of observation once more in the upcoming suburban mystery City of Voices, co-created by someone who has an impressive first-hand pedigree with these sorts of games. 

It's suburban England at the turn of the twenty-first century, where a young woman is "being bullied on her first day at secondary school." That would be challenge enough for any young teenager, but "just when things seem like they can’t get any hairier, she is thrust into a fantastical adventure more perilous and surreal than she could have ever imagined." There will be nine distinct scenarios to solve, in which moments "frozen in time" allow players to leisurely scour for clues and make deductions based on what they've discovered. Narrative details are being kept under wraps for now, but players can expect a "heartfelt story full of twists and turns," and a level of gameplay challenge that promises to ramp up from "a simple opener to fiendishly difficult later levels." 

If much of that (besides the more modern setting and less-brutal-murdery cases to investigate) sounds a lot like the Golden Idol series, it comes by its inspiration honestly, as City of Voices is being co-developed by Will Ackermann of Kini Games, who during the day is a co-designer on Rise of the Golden Idol and its ongoing slate of sequels. This game is being created using the popular Adventure Game Studio (AGS) engine with charming retro-styled 320x180 visuals provided by pixel artist Matt Frith, accompanied by an original orchestral score composed by Philip Aldous. One key departure from the Golden Idol formula is that "rather than drag words into slots to complete sentences, players must answer direct questions by picking from a selection of images, each representing a potential answer." The goal of this change, besides making it easier to translate to other languages, is to "prevent players from being able to figure out the solution using grammatical cues." All told, there should be 4-6 hours of "pure deduction" gameplay to enjoy with "no filler" to artificially pad out play time along the way.

City of Voices is likely still a full year or so away from completion, launching for Windows and Linux on Steam, with other platforms to be targeted later in the development process. There isn't a public demo just yet either, but we are encouraged vicariously by the endorsement of Andrejs and Ernests Kļaviņš, Color Gray Games' Golden Idol co-creators, who have played a private demo and "loved every minute" of what they saw.