Description

Cold War has split the world in two, both figuratively and literally. The Great Divide spans across the globe with an impenetrable mess of concrete and barbed wire sandwiched between the two blocs. You are Leonard Nimby; stone-faced former top agent of IM5, hot on the trail of a shrink gun stolen from you by a villainous mayoral candidate on the eve of a fateful election.

Splittown is a point-and-click adventure game inspired by 90s classics such as Day of the Tentacle and Sam & Max Hit The Road. You'll crack confounding puzzles, stuff improbable amounts of items in your pockets, and engage in humorous dialogue with a colorful cast of characters on an adventure that will push your wits to the limit.

Features

• More gags than you can shake a stick at
• Multi-layered puzzles in a highly interactive world
• Imaginative world inspired by the Cold War
• Large cast of characters with unique motivations and backstories
• Graphics evocative of the golden age of point-and-clicks
• Beautiful in-game maps for travel between locations
• Eclectic score combining ska and rock

Splittown in Media

“The gameplay, visuals and humor feel very much like a love letter to Lucasarts classics. The UI is simple and easy to use (much like the Sam & Max Max UI), the gag rate is high and there’s lots of fun little surprises and easter eggs to discover. There are even some optional objectives to complete…”

“...it’s as if there was a get-together featuring the artists of LucasArts, 90s Nickelodeon cartoons, and Salvador Dali got together and did some acid. Presumably. The perspective in the game is unique and very reminiscent of 90s point and click adventures.“

“I really enjoyed my time inside its world of spies, appreciating small nods to classic games and the inspirations drawn from them.”

About All-Seeing Eye

We're Mats and Juha, two passionate gamers who bonded over our love for the pixelated worlds of the 90s. We've spent countless hours together dissecting what made those games so special, and we're determined to recreate that magic for a new generation.

When we started developing Splittown in 2017, publishers were in no great rush to fund a project like ours. Instead, we've decided to invest our own time and money in creating a game that is true to our vision. We aren't looking to imitate something from the 90s, but instead imagine what a long-lost game developed in our childhood could have looked like.

I've worked on Splittown for about eight years now. My co-developer, Juha, joined around the two-year mark, and we've collaborated ever since. That's nearly a decade dedicated to creating a game that captures a sense of magic from our childhood in the 90s.

Meanwhile, the adventure game genre has experienced its ups and downs. Some have declared the genre dead, while others claim it's more alive than ever. There have been reimaginings, revivals, and throwbacks. Many creators who inspired me to start game development have produced follow-ups (spiritual or otherwise) to their original, genre-defining titles. There have also been new adventure games, like Disco Elysium, which have shook me to my very core and reminded me of why I love video games in the first place.

As I’ve seen these games come and go, I’ve asked myself: is Splittown even necessary anymore? What point is there left in making a point in trying to do an authentic, throwback 90s point and click adventure? Hasn’t it been done, and by the people who are most qualified to do it no less?

I'd be lying if I said I haven't experienced moments of doubt. However, playing contemporary adventure games has only strengthened my resolve. Splittown is necessary. Splittown is special.

I can't shake the feeling that many developers in the genre today view point-and-click games, even at their peak, as fundamentally flawed. This perspective leads modern iterations, even those by the genre's original creators, to feel apologetic about the mechanics and tropes of the genre.

I think this is appealing to a popular opinion that is simply untrue. I believe point and clicks were a part of an evolutionary strand of video games that encompassed other computer-dominant genres like immersive sims and computer RPGs, where world-building, storytelling and immersion were the core of the experience. And they were wonderful.

Did we abandon this strand because the games were bad? No. We moved away from it because these games struggled with the limitations of the consoles at the time. In the late 90s and early 00s, as games began to enter the mass market, these genres were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

We humans often bias towards believing newer things are better, but that's not always true. Splittown is our chance to explore what could have been if we had continued down the evolutionary path abandoned years ago. It's like loading a save file from the mid-90s and choosing a different route.