All great alternative history starts with the question "What if?"
All Walls Must Fall, the new indie game from newly-founded inbetweengames, is no different. It asks what a world in which the Berlin Wall never came down would look like, and so far, what the team has come up with sounds fascinating.
The game is set in 2089. The Cold War has raged for 150 years, and has gotten to the point where both the Soviet Union and the United States use time-traveling secret agents to counter one another's every move. Players will take control of these agents, uncovering a conspiracy between East and West that has kept the two sides, and Berlin, locked in a seemingly endless struggle.
In a blog post about the project, the team describes All Walls Must Fall as combining the isometric tactics of a game like XCOM with the time-traveling story and gameplay opportunities of indie darling Braid. Music will also play a large role as well, as the techno beats of a futuristic Berlin will sync up with the gameplay.
Berlin itself is a major inspiration, too.
"It's a love letter to Berlin, cyberpunk and sci-fi!" Isaac Ashdown says. "I've always thought Berlin was an underused setting in video games. There's been a few games set here, but I've never really felt they captured the city too well — or at least, the city that we live in today. You might think setting a game in the future also has that problem, but we actually want the place to feel somewhat plausibly contemporary despite the sci-fi angle."
That shows in some of the artwork the team is teasing, like the modern interpretation of an iconic mural that once adorned the real Berlin Wall that can be seen below.
So far, the team doesn't have too much to show in terms of gameplay (it's still early in development), but it is hoping to take advantage of its indie status to show off new progress being made on the game each and every week. It's a far cry from the world of NDAs and marketing plans that the founders of inbetweengames previously endured at Berlin-based development studio Yager, the studio most well-known for creating the subversive shooter Spec Ops: The Line.
All Walls Must Fall is currently planned for release on Steam Early Access sometime this fall, with a full release expected to come in 2017.
