I wasn’t sure what to expect from Opus: Prism Peak. It’s art style looked gorgeous, and the story looked like something I always fall for. After playing, I was left feeling something I rarely feel from a short demo. This is a story of loss and finding hope when all seems lost. The gameplay revolves around taking photos to solve environmental puzzles, but it’s how you do this that impressed me. Already I can see this is going to be an emotional journey of rediscovering your self and finding yourself again.
The preview begins with you playing as Eugene at the age of five. Over the course of a few years, you’re taking photos in the wild with your Grandpa. Whether its of flowers or sacred deer, you learn that your parents are fighting. Your mother disappears to the city, and your father is struggling with the break-up. Through photography, you find comfort in the pain of trying to understand love with no experience or concept at such a young age. After these moments, you learn about the struggles Eugene faced while growing up.
Eugene heads to the city to find a career in photography. He find a job but the business shuts down; gets married but his wife leaves him; and opens up a café but it goes under. Then, as the game starts, you learn Eugene is now 40-years old, in an alternate and surreal version of his world, caring for a young girl called Ren. Straight away the vibe between the two reminded me of Joel and Ellie from The Last of Us. He’s jaded, she’s full of life and cheeky. I can see her becoming a beacon of hope for Eugene.
I got to explore an abandoned train station. Sketches cover the walls. Newspaper clippings and notices, broken clocks and lost pages from abandoned notebooks. It’s hard to know what is going on. So, you try to piece together what this world is and what happened to everyone. Other than Ren who you can chat to along the way, the only other character I met was a canine spirit who is waiting for someone on the platform. You see her as a faded spirit at first, but after taking a photo of her with the correct shutter speed, she bursts into frame.
After speaking with the dog, you learn that Ren is afflicted by something known as the Shade. If she is exposed to it for a long period of time, she may disappear completely. You need to find two train tickets to the city. After finding a fire in a corner of the station, you need to take two photos of nearby objects and offer them up in prayer. Once you take a photo of a vending machine and some golden flowers, I gained the tickets needed and headed to the city.
Before I got there, I was transported to some kind of dream world. A darkened forest with photos that can be interacted with, I got to see more of Eugene’s life. More time with his Grandpa and an encounter with a young woman he left behind to go to the big city. While there are plenty of questions I have after finishing the short but sweet demo, it made me reflect on my own journey to a 41-year old father. “Where do grownups go when they lose their way?” is a tag on the game’s Steam page, and it’s something I thought of when playing.
We go through so much as adults. As children, we are filled with such hope and joy. Before knowing the struggles of adulthood and being a parent, we were our own person; capable of creating our own destiny. Things get muddied as we get older. The amount of times I have felt like I’ve lost my way seem to many to count. Opus: Prism Peak is going to be a reflective and emotional adventure, and already, I cannot wait to dive further into the story that Sigono Inc are planning to tell.
Opus: Prism Peak is coming to PC in 2025.
