Image: Dead People Dreaming

It is the year 2409. My ancient, malfunctioning mini-sub is stranded at the bottom of the ocean, damaged by a sea monster... maybe? My support crew is disbelieving, moderately unhinged (including a captain who talks like a cartoon pirate), and tells me I've still got a job to do to pay for my own life-saving repairs. I am a ghost-talking paranormal investigator, sent to uncover the sinister truth behind a bicycle race in 1908. It somehow only gets weirder than here. Good gravy, the demo for Solbrand is strange, but incredibly cool, and you should rush to play it now. I hope you like esoteric interfaces!

It's not often I stumble upon a game that is completely unlike anything else, but if I had to triangulate its place on the great web of genre inspirations, I'd say that it sits roughly between Disco Elysium, Highfleet and The Incident at Galley House. And that will make no sense unless you've played all three and then this demo too. Which, again, you should. Or just skip to the demo, because it's just that good on its own terms.

More directly, this is a game about strange interfaces. It's also an excellently written psychic detective RPG with a delightfully strange cast of characters. All played from the claustrophobic screens and panels of a submarine that was likely not even at its best fifty years ago, and half of the panels are written in Swedish, I believe, although a few worn sticky notes in English. And it seems that every couple of minutes, the genre shifts again, introducing you to yet another set of controls. It helps that it looks and sounds fantastic.

There is SO much going on here, but it's shockingly accessible for all of its head-spinning weirdness. You're meant to be bumbling around blindly at first, but you should be fine so long as you don't hit any of the two (one well labelled, one just very funny) ways to suddenly quit the game. You've got a crew up top to talk with, and the writing so far is great, letting you really dial in what kind of psychic detective you want to be, and how they'll view you, and how you even react to your own inner monologue.

Plus, you're a weird psychic detective. Often, you'll have dialogue options that let you hear the unsaid, see the unseen, and then pin them as notes into your archive of evidence to pin-board your way towards greater truths. It feels like doing real archaeology, with a head full of psychoactive seaweed and with a mechanical body that makes no sense even to itself. Again, this is incredibly cool stuff.

The demo is surprisingly large, too, covering the first of several cases from the full game. While it seems like the full game will delve into the bigger questions of 'why is the world of 2409 flooded' and 'what nightmare event turned the sun deadly', the demo starts you small, with a cycling club asking you to investigate what year a famous bicycle race actually started on. The reputation and future of a long line of prize-winning cyclists hang in the balance. But hey, they're paying clients, and money is tight.

As with everything else in the game, you do this through strange interfaces. Find your way to a key site under the water, tune in your radar to the year you're searching for information about, and dredge up artifacts to draw psychic hints from. Find the remains of people and speak with them. Use the signal resonance you gather from successful discoveries to reveal newspaper clippings from the day of the case, and interact with a half-dozen other minigames. Every action, from moving your sub to divining stuff from your treasure trove of under-sea junk feels like a process, and that's just cool, and I already want more.

There's no release date yet for Solbrand, but the demo is a very juicy platter of deep-seafood. I cannot recommend trying it enough, and I will be diving all the way into the full game the second it's available.