The exclusive inside story of Jumpship’s mysterious sci-fi adventure Somerville

By Alex Spencer

Game Somerville

Developer/publisher Jumpship

Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series

Origin UK Release 2022

An alien monolith looms ominously over a humble farmhouse. A young family huddles on a sofa, asleep in front of a TV that suddenly drops to static. An enormous sci-fi structure shudders violently, two tiny human specks caught within a blinding purple light. Whether their scope is mundane or epic, Somerville is loaded with strong images such as these, which helped it stand out from the crowd at E3 2021’s Xbox showcase and again at The Game Awards in December. Those trailers are dense bursts of imagery, cutting from one moment to the next without explanation of how they connect, what the game between them might actually be.

Naturally, then, when we sit down for our demo of the game, as the first media representatives to see Somerville up close – and the last until the game is ready for release – an explanation is precisely what we seek.

Somerville’s development hasn’t always been such a closely guarded secret. In 2014, Chris Olsen launched a devblog for the game, a side project worked on alongside his day job, working as a film animator and previs artist on everything from Marvel and Star Wars movies to the Wachowskis’ weirdo science-fiction opus Jupiter Ascending. The GIFs he posted drew attention with their stylish character designs and gorgeously fluid animations – that knack for tantalising bursts of imagery already at work – resulting in a partnership with Dino Patti, co-founder and former CEO of Playdead. With Patti having just departed the Danish studio following the release of Inside, he and Olsen announced in 2017 that they would be building a new company, the aptly named Jumpship, around this project. And then the walls went up.

Since then, less than five minutes of Somerville footage has been released, every second made public carefully selected to retain the mystery. Each trailer has suggested an art style quite unlike the one in which Olsen was originally working – and one that, as we learn, has changed multiple times over the course of development. Following our hourlong demo, with Olsen leading us on a whistle-stop tour of sections picked from across the story, we have a much clearer idea of what Somerville is. And, perhaps more importantly, what it isn’t.

Among the things it’s not: the game that Olsen was originally making in 2014. The story – an ordinary family finds itself in the midst of an alien invasion – has remained broadly the same, he tells us, but almost everything else about the Another World-style cinematic action adventure has been ditched since then. “It used to be 2D; now we’ve changed it into a 3D game,” Olsen explains. “It used to have a jump and then I was like, I don’t want to jump. I don’t want it to be a platformer.”

That first version borrowed its core mechanic straight from Ikaruga: an energy shield that could switch between red, blue and yellow, deflecting damage as long as you matched the primary-coloured glow of your alien attacker. Today, while colour still remains a vital concept in Somerville, it’s used in a very different way. The energy shield is gone entirely, and we don’t see a single moment of combat during our demo. In fact, some of the entities we saw tearing off people’s heads in early footage are now entirely benign, maybe even a little adorable – spherical drones that have ditched their flying Manhack act to now roll around your feet like some crossbreed of BB-8 and Pokémon Shield’s Rolycoly.

One of the reasons Olsen is so keen to clarify that Somerville isn’t a platformer, we suspect, is to correct a misconception that has dogged the game for a while. So, for the record, another thing Somerville isn’t: some kind of spiritual successor to Playdead’s games. “From the beginning, all the press was like ‘from the creator of Limbo!’ and loads of reductive comments like that,” Olsen says, with an exasperated laugh. He’s come round to understanding it, though – aside from the Patti connection, the games show a shared fascination with playing in the shadows, both literally and figuratively.