Mr Thready, a hand-drawn indie adventure game by Spanish developer Ayramen Studios, has just had its first teaser trailer released today. It’s being developed for PC, Mac and Linux, with planned ports for Xbox One, PS4, Switch, smartphones and tablets.
There’s something very unsettling about Mr Thready from an aesthetic perspective. Game-wise, it’s comparable to the likes of Limbo and Little Nightmares, but also evokes the feel and atmosphere of animations by David Firth, like Salad Fingers. You’re a voodoo doll trapped in a dangerous sewing factory, and you solve environmental puzzles while exploring its dark and sinister interior.
The art is absolutely breathtaking, with an intense level of detail that’s unsurprising given Ayramen Studios has been working on Mr Thready for four years now. All of the animations are jittery and almost stilted, which makes everything feel slightly off in a very compelling way. The score, produced in-house by Ignacio Falcón, is eerie and echoey, and really adds to the discomfort that you experience seeing the game in action.
Unlike your usual point-and-click adventure game, there’s no inventory in Mr Thready. Instead, you craft every item that you’ll need by combining objects on-screen. In the trailer, we see the player character combine two sewing needles, one bent into a hook, in order to reach a zipper and gain access to a new location. There’s no text or dialogue of any kind either, with conversations between yourself and NPCs that you encounter instead taking the form of an unsettlingly-cutesy mumble a-la Banjo Kazooie with pictograms that convey the information.
Mr Thready doesn’t yet have an official release date, but it’s expected for a 2019 release on PC, Mac and Linux. There are no confirmations on a console and mobile release, but it’s something that Ayramen Studios is working on, so we should hear about that soon.
