Red Thread's Dreamfall Chapters Kickstarter campaign has done an impressive job stirring up anticipation for the next tale in The Longest Journey's saga, passing the $1 million mark to achieve promised stretch goals for added lore, Mac and Linux support, and solemn-looking monkeys . With more support needed to drum up an additional $1 million in extra funding , Director Ragnar Tørnquist and Writer Dag Scheve host a brief in-game tour of the brooding cyberpunk city in a new gameplay trailer.
"Europolis is the dark heart of Europe," Tørnquist says. "Gone are the days of economic growth and prosperity. Europe has become a dystopian, urban-industrial wasteland. Europolis is a cyberpunk vision of the future—dark, crime-ridden alleys, neon signs, seedy nightclubs, and opium-den-like dream factories where people go to escape their dreary realities." Well, there goes my summer vacation plans.
The city spans the former countries of Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic, Belgium, and the Netherlands as part of Stark, an alternate depiction of near-future, techno-dense Earth and the counterpart to Arcadia, a fantasy plane of magic and nature.
It's as cyberpunk as a city gets—boulevards of neon jungles, sheets of rain, and gloomy pedestrians huddled beneath umbrellas for a strong Blade Runner vibe. A Vangelis synth track would feel right at home in Europolis' metro-noir, but the warbles of the trailer's ambiance suggests Red Thread has the city's atmosphere well in hand leading to Dreamfall Chapter's planned November 2014 release.
