Dick heads up: Californium is coming to Steam next week
“If you find this world bad, you should see some of the others.”
Philip K. Dick-inspired sci-fi adventure Californium will arrive on PC and Mac via Steam on 17th February, developer Darjeeling has announced.
The Parisian developer's first-person adventure is touted as an ode to Philip K. Dick, author of The Man in the High Castle, A Scanner Darkly, and the source material for Blade Runner (Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep?) and Total Recall (We Can Remember It for You Wholesale).
You play as Elvin Green, a down-on-his-luck writer in 1967 Berkeley whose wife and editor have abandoned him as he struggles to put together his first novel. Descending down a mental spiral with the help of booze and acid, he discovers a way into alternate realities. "Luckily this nightmarish world is unstable, you can extract yourself from it and thus access another reality! You have nothing to lose!" the developer said of Elvin's inter-dimensional journey.
While not based on any specific work by Dick (as acquiring the rights would likely be a hefty financial burden), Californium does have some official backing as it's being produced by French TV network Arte to promote the upcoming documentary The Worlds of Philip K. Dick.
Our Martin Robinson was ecstatic about Californium after playing a demo of it at EGX last year. "It doesn't carry Philip K. Dick's name, but right now it's looking like one of the best adaptations his twisted philosophies and fictions have ever received," he wrote in his Californium impressions.