Isometric environments, adventure game storytelling, twin-stick controls. What a beautiful harmony of gameplay mechanics. Divide [official site] has got some smooth combat animation going on, and the confidence to slow things down when it comes to storytime. It's character-driven sci-fi. It's wide, detailed scenes. It's deliberate in how much it reveals with every flick of the light switch, every computer hack, every turn around the corner.
Divide emphasizes clue hunting and the thoughts and ideas surrounding truth and lies. You need to find your way home, too, wherever—and whatever—home is. The game wants to mire you in an ever-expanding bog of half-truths and compromises on the truth, spinning out dialogue options, and looking to you, the player, to draw your own conclusions on the narrative. It's a post-truth era, folks. Not sure if Divide realizes it's landing smack dab in the middle of it or not.
While I'm seeing pretty boilerplate writing in the trailer below, but I'm hoping that's simply to cultivate a sense of mystery and to pique my interest without walking me straight into spoiler territory. In a recent PlayStation Blog, developer Exploding Tuba describes Divide as a "lonely sci-fi dungeon crawl," and goes about pieces together its story and environments with non-linear exploration.
I'm also listening to the buttery lead single from the trailer, "Divided," on Spotify. The whole EP is on there. It's written and composed by Chris Tilton, who worked on the music for Assassin's Creed: Unity and the TV series Fringe.
Divide, through either a technical or marketing move, pushed its PlayStation 4 launch window from this year over to January 31.
