One of the least known aspects of GDC is Games Connection, a two day event that gets lots of small and large game developers in one central location in small meeting rooms. From start up developers to established companies they are show off their game prototypes and proposals to interested publishers and others. Games Connection has in the past been kept off limits to the press but this year Traction PR was recruited to get members of the media to meet with many of the companies that are a part of the event. FiringSquad got to see a number of interesting upcoming titles from various developers today at Games Connection. They ranged from The Black Corsair, a family friendly pirate action game from Italian developer Virtual Identity to Deep Water Adventures, a deep sea diving sim game from Russian developer Biart to The Mutiny, a Viking themed action-adventure game from New Brunswick, Canada.

While we didn't get to see every game developer at Games Connection (and some politely declined to discuss with us the games they were showing to publishers), we were blown away by one game in particular; we got to see live. It's a action-adventure game with the working title of Urban Mysteries. This PC-next gen console game comes from the Denmark based company Zeitguys Game Development and was co-founded by former Io Interactive team member Morten Iversen who was the scriptwriter for Io's Hitman series as well as their alternate history action-strategy game Freedom Fighters. Urban Mysteries has alternate timelines in it as well. It takes place in one large fictional city and begins in the year 2052. However, your character has the ability to travel in time and in order to fight a far reaching conspiracy he has to use that ability to make choices and perhaps change history.

We got to see a brief and very early demo build of the game running on Epic's Unreal Engine 3. The first part of the game showed our player character as he explored Urban Mysteries's vision of 2052 with gothic and Victorian architecture. We were told that we would even see Zeppelin like blimps in this future that the player can control and even use in combat. The demo got really interesting when we time traveled to the 18th century version of this city. Here we had to use native weapons like a one shot musket to battle an invasion. The game allows the player to either shoot or attack melee style with the musket to take out enemies. At one point in the demo we have to make a choice. Two people are in a burning building but you can only rescue one. You must decide which one to save and then head back up in time to 2052. The final part of the demo showed our character back in his own time line but we saw the future city change right before our eyes (in-game morphing of the level; not a cut scene) to something totally different.

The team at Zeitguys told us they have a full team of over 25 members working on Urban Mysteries. They are considering either an episodic game release where the first episode will be made available in late 2008 or teaming up with a publisher for a more conventional retail release of the entire game, in which case it would be released in 2009. While the demo we got to see was very, very early (some parts of the game did not have level textures in place) the ambition of creating a non-linear time travel action title is certainly something we are looking forward to and we hope Urban Mysteries finds itself a publisher so it can proceed with this product.

Blog + Share: Digg • Del.icio.us • Reddit • SU • furl • More: