The Path of Motus Announced

By Luc1d,

Developer Michael Hicks has announced that his current project The Path of Motus, a puzzle adventure where words are used as weapons, will be ready for a 2018 console release.

The Path of Motus tells the story of a young goblin called Motus from a village that has been trapped deep within a forest for hundreds of years. While all the others attempting to leave the forest have given up and returned to the village in despair, Motus is determined to be the one who succeeds in finding a way out. His plan involves building bridges through the forest, but he finds the way blocked by bullies who attack him with words. Gameplay combines a verbal combat system with a puzzle system designed to express Motus' feelings as he travels through the forest.

The Path of Motus began life as a quickly made Indie game called Sententia, which was Hicks' first attempt to make a game that uses "gameplay as a way to express meaningful ideas". Sententia was poorly received, but Hicks and his artistic collaborator Goncalo Antunes were undeterred and went on to spend two years developing another Indie title using a similar approach to game design. This next title was a 2.5D collection of puzzle minigames called Pillar which expressed different personality types through gameplay. For example, the energy of introverted characters would drain around other characters while extroverted characters would need to interact with other extroverts to fulfil their purpose.

Pillar was much more successful than Sententia with over 320,000 downloads worldwide since its 2015 release, and gave Hicks and Antunes the confidence to attempt a full remake of Sententia using knowledge gained from developing Pillar. They retained the core concept of Sententia and built on the psychological design approach of Pillar, eventually renaming the project The Path of Motus because the game's execution is very different to that of the original.

The Path of Motus is due to launch in 2018.

We've got the full list of The Path of Motus (EU) trophies - check the list for guides to unlocking them.

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Written by Luc1d

Lucy loves gaming, music, art, stories, baking and Lego (not necessarily in that order). When life gives you lemons, make lemon drizzle Lego cake!