After David Gaider left Bioware after Dragon Age Inquisition was completed, he teamed up with Liam Esler to form Summerfall Studios. After the company’s founding, its numbers grew and their first game began development.
That game is Chorus, not to be confused with the Deep Silver game by the same name. Chorus is a branching path narrative game which is something familiar to Gaider after writing for Dragon Age. What makes Summerfall’s Chorus is unique however, is that the branching dialogue isn’t just dialogue. They’re song lyrics.
In December, Summerfall posted an update about how the game is doing on its crowd funding page, Fig. The post provided a video with some developer commentary as well as some more succinct text descriptors. According to the post, Gaider intended to finish the first draft of the script over the holiday season and “has made excellent progress on the writing of the game.” Gaider did note that the script was more challenging to write given the fact that the game is a musical and much of the dialogue needs to be lyrics.
The Summerfall team has also been hard at work with concept art for the environments, the user interface for the game, and character art. Over in the more technical realm, a save/load system is being tested. The lyricists are working on their drafts for the game’s music and Summerfall continues to look for new team members.
As for the overall synopsis of the game, it stars a singer named Grace who comes face to face with a muse from Greek mythology who then dies in front of her and passes along his abilities to her. Grace must then prove she did not kill the muse to the pantheon; a process that apparently involves a lot of singing and music. Grace can exemplify one of three traits: “kickass,” “clever,” and “charming.” Players can stick with a particular trait throughout the entire game, or they can change traits as they play the game. Different traits will allow Grace to approach situations in different ways.
Of course, Grace isn’t the only character. She is joined by her best friend and band mate Freddie, the gods Apollo and Hermes, the mythical Pan, and the ruler of the Underworld, Persephone. Those of you who know their Greek mythology may be wondering why Persephone is the ruler of the underworld and why Hades is not. For Chorus, Summerfall has imagined a different version of this universe in which Persephone took over the Underworld from Hades.
Chorus will be released for PC with a currently undisclosed release date.
Source: Chorus’ Fig Page
