Downtown Los Angeles, 2005. A hot, bloated, extravagant E3, and everyone more excited than normal because it’s new-console year. PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Revolution (Wii) are all at the show, and anything labelled “next-gen” is stampeded. Perhaps that’s how a group of Swedish students, with no publisher and no track record, manage to entice people to see their game.
But, there is something exciting about what they’re doing. Their game is different, darker, and more off-beat than mainstream games usually are. It’s set in a dark city of warped rooftops and gnarled horizons, a place run by a malicious Corporation and its mysterious world-building machine, powered, it seems, by the souls of children. Children sent back out to work in the city as mindless zombies dubbed metrognomes.
You play a young steam-train engineer’s apprentice, whose routine obedience is challenged the day he meets a girl on one of his trains. She questions the world around her and begins to make you question it too. She opens your eyes. Together you’ll uncover the truth of this city, the City of Metronome.
There’s something in how the game plays, too. It doesn’t have traditional combat. Instead it uses sound. With a kind of backpack and attached listening tube, you can record the world around you and then replay sounds to various effect. You can solve puzzles with them, like voice-activated locks. You can send enemies scurrying away with loud sounds. And you can use music to soothe the sad children, who will do things for you in return. Need a heavy block moving? No problem. Need someone to throw themselves into the cogs of a giant machine to bring it grinding to a halt? You’re a monster, but yes, they will.
That was City of Metronome, dark and moody and memorable, and by the looks of the playable demo, well on the way to becoming a full game. After E3, we waited eagerly to hear more. But a year later, nothing, and a year after that, nothing too. We waited and we waited but City of Metronome faded away.