Lengthy demo powered up for CRT7

• Announcements by Jack Allin
• Published:

Retrofuturistic tech puzzler coming soon from the BAFTA-winning creator of SOLAS 128

"Shall we play a game?" While that line may mean something very specific to movie fans of a certain vintage, it's also fairly applicable to CRT7, an upcoming new sci-fi puzzler from Amicable Animal set almost entirely in front of various corrupted retrofuturistic tech screens.

While WarGames may have been about stopping a nuclear annihilation, it's clear something terrible has already happened in CRT7, known only as "the event." You play an unnamed first-person protagonist who ventures into a "dark basement lost to time," which has been generating a mysterious signal you've spent years of your life trying to track. A lone computer monitor glows with power, and on it you find a "unique musical arcade puzzle game ... that seems to have a special purpose, alongside messages from its creator." What happened down here that "rippled out into the wider world" and left its final occupant filled with regret? To answer that, you'll need to decipher notebooks left behind, continually light new sections of the room, and unlock the many strange devices scattered around it, playing minigames like pentominoes to generate power along the way. If all goes well, you may even discover a way "fix the mistakes of the past" while you're at it.

CRT7 is the follow-up to the developer's BAFTA Scotland Game Winner SOLAS 128, and once again represents an "experimental music-puzzle game." Like a higher-tech version of The Room, the goal here is to access and complete the challenges of each new device you encounter by collecting related clues and figuring out their "strange and alien" operations. The game can be controlled by simple point-and-click, but instead of relying on a traditional adventure game interface, here the means of interaction is based specifically on each piece of individual equipment, including "cryptic machines, video players, and long-dead operating systems." As you progress, procedurally generated music will adapt to how you play. And if you get stuck at any point, a once-state-of-the-art hint system is available via the in-game phone.

While no release date has been announced for the full version of CRT7 just yet, there's plenty to keep you occupied while you wait as a substantial two-hour demo is available now on Steam for Windows PC.