Amnesia Fortnight: Four Pitches Advance To Prototype Stage

Amnesia Fortnight moves pretty fast. One week ago Double Fine's yearly-except-when-busy publicly voted game prototype jam started with 31 pitch videos. Now backers have had time to vote, that list has been whittled down to the four games that are going to be developed into a prototype. The winners? Steed, Mnemonic, Dear Leader and Adventure Time creator Pendleton "the person I would most like to meet" Ward's Little Pink Best Buds.

I've embedded the video pitches for each of the selected games below.

Recap: previously, on posts I've written about Amnesia Fortnight, what is Amnesia Fortnight? From the Humble page:

Amnesia Fortnight is a lawless, unforgiving, creative supernova - an internal game jam that we started in 2007 as a behind-the-closed-doors-of-the-chocolate-factory kind of a deal, but have now exposed to the public whether they want it or not!

Here’s how it works: We take two weeks off from whatever we’re working on, split the company into small teams, and give each team two weeks to make a game. It’s not easy or fair; but it is exciting. We do it to test out new ideas, and to test out new project leaders who feel ready to have a project of their own. Some of these project leaders will live, and the others, well, they will also live. But they will NEVER BE THE SAME.

Pen Ward's Little Pink Best Buds was, of the four Ward pitched, the idea that had the best name. That's enough for me. "Uncover the mystery of the little pink dudes who all want to be your friend." It's about poking those little dudes, and talking to them with typed natural language (Ward references Facade). You pick one of those little pink dudes to be best friends with, and then you move into a house, and... Just, just watch the video.

Steed was one of the games I was most interested in, because it has a horse with a raised eyebrow. That horse is who you control, as you take missions to carry heroes on dangerous missions. It sounds like a modern-era Disney fairytale.

People really like making games about "re-arranging memories." Mnemonic is about doing so to solve the mystery of who killed the woman you loved, though I'm interested in it mostly for the art style.

Dear Leader is the game here I most want to play. The trendy description would be 'Papers, Please where you control the ruling government', but I prefer to imagine it as Positech's Democracy only without the, you know, democracy.

You can buy access to all four prototypes, plus 2012's prototypes, plus the documentary series and livestreams recording the development process, over at the Amnesia Fortnight Humble store page.