Shape of the World coming this year

In my teens I was in a band with a couple of friends, practising on Saturdays in my friend’s living room, aspiring to be the next Radiohead… you know, no biggy. One day during a school holiday we decided to go to the woods. We took our cameras and wandered through the woods taking photos of all the trees and wildlife.

You see, I live in Sherwood Forest, so these trees are centuries old, all grimacing faces, wise-looking and all staring at us; it’s only when history is staring at you, you realise how beautiful and fragile the world is. It seems like developer Hollow Tree Games wants to share that beauty too with their debut game Shape of the World:

Shape of the World Coming This Year

Shape of the World is a first-person exploration game where you play as an outsider, discovering a surreal looking realm and a reactive ecosystem.

Here are the game’s features:

• Experiment with an organic and mysterious ecosystem: Play with mystical animals, ephemeral vegetation and intriguing monoliths.
• A dynamic soundtrack that responds to the player’s travels: The audio environment is a central component of the game, amplifying your experience of the world.
• Procedural Population: The forest only materializes around you when you get close, regrowing in a new way each time you pass. Will you find your way back?
• First Person Exploration: More than just a ‘walking simulator’. Slide, soar and dive into a living world, at once familiar and alien.

Hollow Tree Games is another indie studio comprised of talent who have worked in the AAA game space. Here we have Stu Maxwell, senior VFX artist on Gears of War 4; a 20-year veteran of computer graphics and procedural animation, Athomas Goldberg, and composer Brent Silk.

Shape of the World looks absolutely gorgeous basically, with its minimalistic style and the use of striking colours against darker colours, it really gives the game an alien look to it. This could be a game that sits alongside other indie giants. Only time will tell.

Shape of the World is coming to PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Switch in 2018.