Dark secrets: The exclusive inside story of Jumpship’s mysterious sci-fi adventure Somerville headlines Edge 368

gamesradar.com:

It made a splash at E3 2021, and then again at The Game Awards late last year. But it feels like we still know precious little about Somerville, the mysterious sci-fi adventure from Guildford’s Jumpship, founded by Chris Olsen in collaboration with former Playdead CEO Dino Patti. Well, all that is about to change: the latest edition of Edge, out today, features the first in-depth look at the game, and it’s shaping up to be something rather special. 

Now in its eighth year of development, Somerville isn’t the same game writer-director Olsen initially conceived. It remains the story of an ordinary family caught in the middle of an alien invasion, but this cinematic action-adventure – inspired by Eric Chahi’s Another World and its “flagrant disregard of traditional game loops” – has moved from 2D to 3D. “It used to have a jump and then I was like, I don’t want to jump. I don’t want it to be a platformer,” Olsen says.

So what is it, then? Patti’s involvement has inevitably drawn a number of comparisons with Inside and Limbo, but it’s not really a spiritual successor to Playdead’s games – even if Olsen understands why it’s been described that way. “In games, there’s very few studios that have that approach of, ‘No, let’s not put anything there, or let’s just keep that suggestive’. I think that there’s often this need to fill space in games with a lot of stuff.” Somerville is similarly happy to take its sweet time, and let its mysteries percolate, but it’s also been pared back, any extraneous elements cut to avoid repetition of mechanics and environments. 

During an expansive discussion with the studio, we learn about how its atmospheric world was built, and the challenge of creating Sediment, a living alien entity and