Here is a further recovery of the titles shown at the Opening Night Live, one of the games that struck us the most at the event, and not only because it was made by an Italian studio: it is LOFSÖNG, a project in development at the Turin-based Unrelated Studio that was announced during the ID@XBOX Showcase in April, and which now reveals its gameplay.

LOFSÖNG is a completely dialogue-free single player exploration adventure, built around a simple, but at the same time complex, question: how can humanity communicate with the future?

From an artistic point of view, the game strongly recalls the works of Playdead, the authors of Limbo and Inside: brutalist atmospheres, silhouettes, a world that tells through images. The difference lies in the perspective, since here everything takes place with an isometric view, perfect for restoring the monumentality of the geometric environments.

In the game we will find ourselves on a dead Earth, in a region called Dust Sea, where the Exclusion Zone rises from the immense brutalist desert of ashes, a forbidden area and the heart of the mystery. Here we will take on the role of a childish-looking traveler, accompanied by an origami companion capable of shapeshifting, and we will move between colossal architectures in which sound becomes memory. Singing and sound interactions will be our main tools: by singing we will reveal the secrets of ancient structures, we will read the traces of meaning left in the stone and in the vibration, and advancing towards the epicenter of the forbidden zone we will bring to light the memories of the humanities that preceded us.

The world that awaits us is ancient, hostile, and profoundly alien. Mutated biomes, engineered organisms, and analog-mechanical creatures with unpredictable behavior have reclaimed a landscape marked by one catastrophe after another. At the center of it all is the path to the Last Monument, where we will learn and intone the actual Lofsöng: a funeral elegy for all mankind.

The project was initially born as an idea for an animated short film, but it turned out to be too ambitious for such a "static" medium, and the authors therefore decided to opt for the interactivity of video games.

There are three declared influences at the basis of the work. The first is the concept of deep time combined with nuclear semiotics, or the problem of how to signal a danger to civilizations and languages that do not yet exist, thousands of years later: the radioactive waste repository in Onkalo, Finland, and the debate on how to signal it to future generations represent one of the foundations of the game. The second is brutalist and post-modern architecture, in particular the philosophy of Talking Architecture, according to which a building communicates identity and function through geometry, form and symbolism: each monument is designed to speak to us through its own structure. The third is the work of the Sardinian artist Pinuccio Sciola, whose sound stones inspired the language made of vibration, resonance and memory engraved in matter. Sound, in short, is not just atmosphere, but one of the main ways in which we will read the world.

The narrative of the game will be divided into five acts and seven chapters, each linked to a different future humanity. Each chapter coincides with a monument and each monument holds a memory: put together, they make up the Lofsöng itself. An experience built to be interpreted through observation, listening and experimentation, with a tone that focuses entirely on mystery, transcendence and the search for meaning along time scales that surpass all understanding.

At the moment no release window has been communicated: LOFSÖNG is still in development, and to find out more we will have to wait for the next updates of the Turin studio. In the meantime, here is the gamescom trailer, which reveals the gameplay. Enjoy the viewing!