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How do you fund an indie game? Why, with another indie game of course! This is, at least partially, the thinking behind Leaving Lyndow, a first person exploration game out next week from Eastshade Studios. It’s a chilled out hour or so walking around different parts of a peaceful island.
Leaving Lyndow is set in the ‘Eastshade universe’, Eastshade also being a first person, open world, violence free exploration game currently in development for PC. It’s being made by a small team lead by founder Danny Weinbaum who had, as they often have at indie studios, worked on AAA titles before setting up his own studio. He talks more about why they stopped working on a game to, er, make a game in a dev blog about it.
The thinking is that Leaving Lyndow will give people a bit of a lead in to Eastshade whilst giving the devs some experience on launching a title, and will also net them a bit more funding for the development of the larger game. They’d considered something like Kickstarter, but Weinbaum says that they decided for about the same amount of effort as crowdfunding they could make a game and ‘Instead of selling people a promise we could sell them an actual game.’ Weinbaum is clear that Leaving Lyndow is not a demo, and is it’s own game that is ‘Certainly very different from Eastshade mechanically.’
First impressions of Leaving Lyndow are that it may be short, but there’s a surprising amount of detail to be found in it. You play Clara, who is about to leave her home to go on a dangerous ocean exploration — hence the Leaving in the title — and is visiting favourite spots around the island before she does. It’s a gentle experience. It is not, however, without interaction on your part: there are objectives. You have to explore to find certain things or look around enough before you can move on to the next area, so you do have to actively engage with what you’re doing.
Interaction with characters is free from clunky exposition in the dialogue, so you get glimpses of relationships that are years old and have to figure out the full shape of them yourself. It’s nice to talk to someone who is clearly a love interest but doesn’t go ‘I can’t believe we’ve been going out for six years!’ just to make sure you, the player, know that you’ve been going out for six years, even though it would be an idiotic thing for anyone to say to their girlfriend in real life.
It also looks lovely, especially the colour palette and the sky, and has a bit of Morrowind about it somehow — but if Morrowind was full of sunshine and trees with pink foliage, and absent horrible creatures trying to kill you. This does inevitably mean that it won’t be for everyone, however, so take a look at the trailer to get a feel for it. We’ll have more thoughts on it when we’ve finished poking around.
Leaving Lyndow is out on Steam on February 8.
