Above you'll find the trailer for a full motion video point-and-click adventure game called Yoomurjak's Ring. Originally released in Hungary in 2006, it was re-released in 2009 for PC with English subtitles and then again for the iPhone and iPad in 2015. And now it's on Steam.
Despite its longevity I was somehow completely unaware of Yoomurjak's Ring until today when Wes dropped the trailer, which you can see embedded above, into our Slack channel.
The trailer is a wonderful, baffling delight. Wes said he watched it without the sound on and I immediately demanded he unmute it and watch it again, because it's a game trailer but it's set to music that sounds reminiscent of an '80s sitcom theme song, something like Perfect Strangers or Growing Pains. And this is a game where a Manhattan journalist investigates time travel in Hungary, gets punched in the face, has terrifying nightmares, survives a massive explosion, considers eating an obscenely large plate of food, and talks to a man in a pool. (I am basing this synopsis entirely on the trailer, which you should watch again.)
I've just started playing it and have already found one helpful feature: all the conversations you have (in Hungarian with English subtitles) are saved in a logbook, in text, so if you remember talking to a friendly travel agent, a suspiciously nosy old man, or a face-punching brute but can't recall exactly what they said, you can just open your logbook and look it up. The environments are photographed but this ain't Myst: you can turn and look around the locations in 360 degrees, and conversations take place in first-person perspective video.
Here's Yoomurjak's Steam page, where you can purchase the adventure for $10, and follow it up with its sequel, Miazma or the Devil's Stone, which has been on Steam since last year. Odd for the sequel to have arrived on Steam so far ahead of the first game, but we are talking about time travel, right?
