A
// summary
Explore, deduce, and sort through the shifting anatomy
of a city grown beyond recognition.
Kiezpunk is an exploratory deduction game in the tradition of games such as Return of the Obra Dinn and Her Story. Players reconstruct a complex story with a high degree of player agency by exploring scenes and arranging them chronologically.
B
// state
Kiezpunk is currently in early development, with a focus on securing funding and building a strong foundation for production. Core aspects of the game and narrative design have been established through extensive conceptual work and testing in multiple game jams. [see screenshots]
Forgotten Frames // testing exploratory game feel...
Portent // testing interfacing and information gathering...
Harmony Hub // testing deduction and board interface...
The Wedding Cake // testing non-linear narrative techniques...
We are now developing a playable prototype centered around a first test case, designed to validate the game’s core mechanics and case structure.
C
// narrative
Berlin in the year 2354. What was once a city of diverse neighborhoods, the banks of the Spree, and public parks has now melted into a single, huge block of buildings towering high into the foggy sky of eastern Germany.
The individual rooms are connected to each other in ways that are sometimes more, sometimes less conventional: behind a cramped corner shop, a spiral staircase leads to a living room in the style of the Weimar Republic. Through its kitchen, a long, empty, and narrow corridor leads down to the long-forgotten and abandoned zoo, where, if you look closely, you can still find a hipster apartment with hammocks and a record player laboriously spinning away. Some places are lively, others are deserted in a way that seems eerie. The flooded subway tunnels are now a mixture of waterways and swimming pools.
Such a world and society are decentralized in and of themselves. The remaining people live somewhere in these semi-public, semi-private spaces, wherever they can. It is a world between utopia and dystopia, between connectedness and separation.
Koster earns his living by uncovering increasingly mysterious occurrences in the city and finding his clients' lost family members or friends. He encounters more and more strange cases in which people seem to have completely disappeared off the face of the earth, only to reappear with a new identity in a completely different place.
In the middle of the game, he finds someone who looks exactly like his sister Lorene. She asks him to find someone, but can't remember ever being related to Koster. He sets out to find the mysterious figure. But when he finally finds them, he can hardly believe his eyes. They look like.. himself. Now he finally begins to doubt his grasp on reality, and the winding streets of Berlin feel more than ever like the streets of an absurd fever dream. The only thing that helps is a peppermint schnapps at his favorite bar. For now...
D
At the heart of the gameplay is the exploration of so-called snapshots: frozen 3D scenes that capture a single moment in time like a freeze frame. These scenes can be explored freely in first-person view, but time itself is suspended—similar to the death tableaux in Return of the Obra Dinn. Players investigate these suspended moments, uncovering connections through body language, glances, objects, spatial layouts, and lingering audio echoes.
Some scenes are initially only available in fragments. Players must match these fragments to unlock complete scenes, which are then more comprehensive than the sum of their parts.
All snapshots of a case are available from the beginning. They appear as photographs on a classic detective board in Koster's office, where they can be freely moved and linked. By selecting a photo, players dive directly into the corresponding snapshot to explore it. The ultimate goal is to arrange all snapshots in their correct chronological order.
Once the timeline is reconstructed, the case is solved: a voice-over from Koster delivers his conclusions in the style of a classic whodunnit. Accompanied by white fades, players are guided through each snapshot in sequence, now re-experiencing the events with the clarity of the full story.
E
// team
With experience in theater, film, art, and game design, we bring together diverse perspectives; the perfect foundation for creating a game that combines deduction mechanics with narrative depth.
Johannes Dreibach // Narrative Design, Game Writing