Exclusively at The Escapist Indie Showcase today, publisher Iceberg Interactive and developer Bit Rot revealed the announcement trailer for Recursive Ruin, a kaleidoscopic first-person narrative-puzzle game about a struggling artist in “an infinitely fractal world of strange beauty and mind-bending physics.” It is a personal story dealing with loss, grief, anxiety, and finding meaning in a chaotic world, but there are some mathematical and philosophical concepts baked into it as well.
Bit Rot consists of twin brothers Curtis McKinney and Chad McKinney, who between the two of them are handling all aspects of game design. Since they have a background in music, their approach to game development is similar to their approach to music composition: They’re trying to express ideas and emotions in a way that can’t be done with words.
The novel Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter is a major influence on Recursive Ruin because it introduced the concept of a “strange loop,” where you traverse forward through hierarchical space in a single direction, yet you somehow return to the spot you began at. Despite how heady that concept may sound, the ultimate goal of Recursive Ruin is just to bring some joy and hope into the world — and to enable players to enjoy some fun puzzles while doing so.
Recursive Ruin will launch sometime in 2022 on PC via Steam.
