The cult-classic movie featuring Bill Murray about a man reliving the same day over and over is finally getting a sequel, but not in the way we expected it to.
In Groundhog Day: Like Father Like Son, you play as Phil Connors Junior, the son of the original movie’s protagonist, presumably a result of his relationship with Rita, that thing that finally turned out to break the Groundhog’s… curse? Godly intervention? It was never really explained. Little Junior there is having a bit of a problem though, as he finds himself in the same predicament his father once had to face.
Also, it’s going to come out only in VR. Your job is to, through trial and error, reach the end of the loop. At least I hope that’s the case, there’s a possibility that the loop just never ends. If that’s the case, that’s one hell of a morbid game.
Honestly, I really like this idea on multiple different levels. In a meta-sense, all games are kinda like the Groundhog Day, we replay the same actions over and over, hoping for a more satisfactory result, which can lead to us to perform actions with a keen knowledge of the future. To the NPCs in the game, it would surely look rather creepy.
And I think transferring a narrative like that into a media more fitting it is a really cool idea. I think it says something about gaming as a medium when creators look at classic stories realized in film and go “you know where this would work even better? In a video-game”. I imagine this was the same thought process people once went through when film just became possible and they were reading books.
But that’s just musings of a pretentious person, in the end I just hope this is a fun VR puzzler. There’s a lot that can be done with this freedom, hopefully the game allows the players a lot of options to mess with the loop. Maybe it can even be coded in such a way as to make breaking the loop highly specific, such that it takes a lot of effort to uncover exact steps. Exploring that is going to pretty fun, I’m certainly excited.