Away From Them
"Away from Them" is an investigation game that plunges us into a community living on the fringes of society in Montana in the United States. Following a misanthropic ideology, the families raise a child, leaving him to believe that there is no society outside the community. He has to find clues around his camp to convince himself that there is life beyond his own family.
Context
The game is set in Montana, in the north of the United States. Travis Barnum is a veteran of the Iraq war who fell to the bottom of the social ladder on his return home, saddled with debt and no job. When his wife died in childbirth during the birth of his son, he fell into a spiral of hatred towards society and decided to organise an anarchist community of a dozen people to live isolated from the rest of the world. He brings up his son by lying to him about the outside world, making him believe that he disappeared when the system collapsed and that there is hardly anyone left except themselves and their enemies. No one in the community is allowed to tell him the truth. But as the child grows up, he discovers that the world looks very different from the way it was described to him...
Roles and involvement in the project
Away From Them is the second project I've completed on my own during my second year of Game Design. My ambition was to demonstrate my increased development skills to make a puzzle game based on clue-finding and choice-based dialogues, built around an original story about life on the fringes of society and rejection of it.
Thanks to this project, I've seen myself grow in terms of skills in puzzle game mechanics and new storytelling methods across several characters. It was a great opportunity for me to step out of my comfort zone as a neophyte of the genre and confront new challenges.
