23 February 2009
Ferry

Singularity videogame revealed in first trailer

The sci-fi first-person shooter Singularity will be coming to PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 in 2009. But no one really knew what it was about until developer Raven Software — of HeXen series and Quake 4 fame — revealed the first trailer, which you can watch below.

The story revolves around a mysterious island known only as “Katorga-12″ where Russian experiments took place during the height of the Cold War era, when Stalin saw fit to start experiments around an unknown material “Element 99″ that he thought was a new energy source of unparalleled power. Use your wits and the perfect weapon — the Time Manipulation Device — to unravel the conspiracy on this remote island. You will fight your way through an ever-shifting environment haunted with time ravaged creatures, while sudden time waves hurl you back and forth between 1950 and the present day. At certain points during the game, locales will undergo a shift in time where the area is either reversed or moved forward through time. Ruined buildings will become new structures featuring Russian political decorations, and one level involving a battleship makes use of this, as the player will enter in the 1950’s period and then try to escape in mid-battle while it crumbles around them after one of the aforementioned shifts occur.

The gameplay will revolve around a handheld Time Manipulation Device, TMD for short. It will be able to move a single object through the spectrum of time, its functions include: Rewind, Age, Stasis, and Pulse. It will be used both in classic FPS-style combat as a weapon and in Half-Life style puzzle solving. For example: using the TMD’s Rewind functionality on a human opponent will send them into a “placental” state where they revert to an almost amoebic state before dying slowly. Examples of the device being used in puzzles involve sending a lock forward in time to watch it rust and crumble away, sending a broken bridge backwards to watch it return to a usable state, and sending a tree trunk forwards while standing on it as it grows to reach higher areas.

Fight the past. Save the future. Prevent the Singularity. Stop the reading. Watch the trailer.

The uncut trailer is available at singularity-thegame.com.