The Amusement
By Curvature Games
Games Lift 2020
The Amusement is a narrative VR adventure that uses real walking to let you explore and discover the history of an abandoned amusement park in the 1920s.
The Game
You mysteriously inherit your estranged father’s pride and joy, an amusement park on a remote island in the German north sea. This beloved park from your childhood has been abandoned for almost 10 years. It is now a shadow of its former self and desperately needs maintenance.
While spending much of your time exploring the rides and repairing them for the park’s sale, you are confronted by tumultuous memories of joys and tragedies. You must untangle this conflicting web of your past and present to face an uncertain future.
The Amusement is in the same vein as atmospheric narrative games for 2D platforms. Often lovingly referred to as Walking Simulators, our game offers the next step in immersive explorative storytelling: Real Walking. With movement echoing that of the real world, we want to enhance this genre with the power of VR. We have an innovative scientific solution, baked into the very core of the Amusement: Redirected Walking.
Redirected Walking is a locomotion technique that exploits perceptual limitations to guide players on a path in the real world that differs from the perceived path in the virtual world. This way, huge virtual environments can be explored in a room-scale VR setup.
The Team
Curvature Games is a german VR studio founded in January 2020. We are convinced that VR is the perfect medium for immersive storytelling and we use unique locomotion techniques such as redirected walking to maintain a strong sense of presence. Our games are targeting location-based entertainment as well as home entertainment.
Our team consists of 8 experienced game designers, programmers and artists. Co-Founder and Creative Director Eike Langbehn did basic research on locomotion in VR during his PhD thesis at the University of Hamburg. Co-Founder and Managing Director Dennis Briddigkeit brings in strong experiences in marketing & PR. And Hannah, Tim and Marc worked on "Elevator... to the Moon!", a VR adventure funded by Oculus and released on a variety of VR platforms.
We release our first studio title „Frozen Factory“, a co-op multiplayer puzzle experience, for location-based VR platforms in 2021. Currently, we are working on the singleplayer adventure „The Amusement“.
