American Arcadia has all the markings of a future indie darling

digitaltrends.com:

The 2D platformer and first-person puzzler genres are both pretty played out. From Super Mario Bros. 3 for platformers to Portal for first-person puzzle games, it’s unlikely that there are many surprises left in each genre individually. So why not mash them together as American Arcadia does?

The next game from Spanish developer Out of the Blue and publisher Raw Fury is about a typically unsuspecting worker attempting to escape from Arcadia. That place seems to be a capitalist utopia but is actually a demented The Truman Show-like reality show where unpopular characters or those who find out too much die. American Arcadia’s compelling story and genre mashup left the biggest impression on me out of anything at this year’s Tribeca Fest.

My demo started with Trevor, a lanky and nerdy worker, being interrogated over his attempts to flee from Arcadia. This immediately sets up an air of intrigue and gave the demo (and presumably the full game) a clever framing device. I then saw how this whole fiasco started. Trevor works for megacorp INAC as a lowly office worker helping to run a supercomputer called Ada.

Trevor comes into work one day to discover that his friend Gus won an all-expenses-paid trip to another country, but as he’s working, the devices around him are hacked, and a mysterious benefactor tells him that Gus is dead and that he’ll die soon too if he doesn’t run. Obviously, this scares Trevor, who follows this mysterious guardian angel’s instructions to a back room to find that there isn’t a supercomputer there, but a performance stage instead.

When playing as Trevor, American Arcadia plays out as a simple 2D cinematic puzzle-platformer. He has a weighty jump and usually needs to push or pull objects into place to help