The newly formed Studio Reset revealed their first game on July 29: The Eventide, a single-player supernatural mystery adventure, currently in early development for PC on Steam. Players will control a team of paranormal investigators in a Canadian neon-noir cityscape, as part of a covert organization known as The Eventide Agency.
In a city that is “stylish, strange, and deeply unsettled,” the Eventide Agency is tasked with monitoring, studying, and intervening in strange incidents that seem to be growing in frequency. Is it a possession, an apparition, a tulpa? They’re all fair game, and they all need to be dealt with.
At the beginning of every case, the player must choose which agents from their roster will conduct the investigation. Each agent has their own beliefs, expertise, and way of seeing the world, meaning that depending on who gets assigned to the case, players will make different discoveries and get different interpretations of the clues. Studio Reset is calling this system “Parallax Deduction”.
In The Eventide, understanding your agents is the key to solving the case. While one may be able to analyze scientific evidence in a scene, another may be able to more effectively identify contradictions in a witness statement, while yet another may have a skill beyond normal human ability. Included in the reveal were three of the potential agents and their abilities:
- Evelyn “Eve” Atwood, The Cryptozoologist: patient, methodical, and deeply discerning, Eve grounds supernatural phenomena in material evidence, systems, and biology.
- Sam “Brass” Hingle, The Former Detective: pragmatic, affable, and hard to fool, Brass reads people, motives, and social dynamics better than anyone in the room.
- Kira, The [REDACTED]: quiet, observant, and difficult to explain, Kira perceives latent psychic and emotional energies that others may never notice.
The Eventide combines agent-driven exploration and narrative deduction to create a “detective fantasy around…the uncomfortable space between what happened and what people are able to understand.” As studio co-founder Kaelin Lavallee said in an interview with GameObserver in early June:
It’s like lighting a single candle in a room…You’re not going to see everything at first. But the more candles you light, the more time you take to do it, you’ll eventually be able to see everything.
Players can wishlist the game and view the teaser trailer on Steam now.
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