is a stealth game that pulls from a number of disparate, eccentric sources – the Thief series, Ico
and Shadow of the Colossus
, classic American writer William S. Burroughs, filmmaker David Lynch and English novelist JG Ballard, to name a few. The twist comes when developer Alex Harvey dips each of these influences in his own brand of avant-garde, black-tinted paint.
is seeking £35,000 on Kickstarter
and so far it's raised £29,755 with seven days to go. If all goes well, Tangiers
should hit PC, Mac and Linux in mid-2014.
The world of Tangiers
is reactive, pulling from the "cut-up" technique that Burroughs popularized in the mid-1900s, where a linear story would be chopped up and pasted back together in a different order, to tell a new tale. Each decision players make changes the sandbox environment around them, spanning from an urban playground to a desolate desert – though all of it remains creepy, it seems.
Players have to find and take out five targets, using techniques such as physically altering an enemy's speech by rearranging words on the screen: "Turn them into reality – a character mentions rats and you can turn his words into a devouring swarm of them," Harvey's studio, Andalusian, writes.
"Traditional rules are lost. Buildings ignore gravity, ignore the constraints of space. Architecture adopts the mind-state of its inhabitants, who are in turn physically and violently changed in response. This is a world that is as horrific as often as it is absurd and inane."