Phoning Home Announced by Startup Indie Developer ION LANDS

September 1st, 2015 Karla Munger

Phoning Home Announced by Startup Indie Developer ION LANDS

Here we have an exploration survival game in which the main character is a small but versatile robot

Category: Upcoming Release

Written by 396 on September 1, 2015

Developed by ION LANDS

Platform: Mac, Windows

Visit the Greenlight page

Arachnophobe alert! There be spiders here, but they’re not too bad as spiders go…

Marko, of developer ION LANDS: If you look at this little guy, I hope you will feel like myself and just adore him. That was actually quite my intention with this game.

Mission accomplished with me, Marko! I took one look at the trailer and that little mechanical critter just melted my heart.

Phoning Home is the story of ION, a robot who crash-lands on an unknown planet. His only chance of survival is to signal his home planet, but his ship is almost completely destroyed.

With A.I. as his only companion, he begins the most important mission of his life. Move over, E.T.: ION must find a way to phone home.

The game is set in an open world with realistic time-of-day lighting and varied weather conditions and temperatures. From forests and snowy mountains to volcanoes, canyons and deserts – you need to find your way. The different areas are connected via portals, but beware: once you enter a portal, you can’t use the same portal to go back.

ION enters one of these portals and encounters a real surprise. He meets ANI — an even smaller robot — in need of ION’s help. I experience more heart meltage.

When you free ANI from the claws of a huge spider the gameplay changes drastically. While ANI is a big help in combat, she can’t fly. You need to craft a temporal teleportation device to move ANI around obstacles that you would overcome by flying. Sometimes you will need to find clever ways to accomplish this in order to move on. The solutions to exploration and survival are not always obvious, but they are out there somewhere and these two robots have quite a few tricks up their non-existing sleeves.

Gameplay in Phoning Home will offer both first-person and third-person perspective. Movement is via WASD keys; the mouse rotates the camera.

If all goes according to plan, Phoning Home will be released on PC/Windows and Mac in Q1 2016. Meanwhile, please consider voting it up on Greenlight.

Karla Munger

I've been with JA in one capacity or other since 2003. I'm currently website administrator. I'm also a digital artist (my avatar is one of my creations). I write reviews and articles, create graphics and basically help tend the site. It's work I enjoy very much. I love playing games of all kinds, but adventure and RPGs are my favorites (particularly scary/dark/unsettling ones). At the top of my list are The Cat Lady, The Longest Journey, Dreamfall, Still Life (first one only), Scratches and Culpa Innata. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool recluse and prefer the company of animals, hardware and ghosts to human beings (no offense). And no bio would be complete without my saying that I do NOT care for phones of ANY sort. Further, I think Dell computers are garbage and that Microsoft has become megalomaniacal. "I put my heart and soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process." - Vincent Van Gogh "I need solitude for my writing; not like a hermit - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man." - Franz Kafka "I've been to hell and back, my boy." - Susan Ashworth, The Cat Lady

Phoning Home Announced by Startup Indie Developer ION LANDS

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