Announced at The Indie Horror Showcase 2024, Escape from Mutation Station is a brand new upcoming horror escape room, that the developer describes as being both "short" and "unconventional."
The game is set to release on Steam between the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025, but ahead of its release I got a chance to speak with the developer to learn more.
Thank you for reaching out to me! My name is Ben, and I'm the founder of Netto's Game Room. I'll admit I actually missed the announcement of your game! Before we get into that though, could you tell me a little about yourself?
Sure! My name is Janne Markkula, but I mostly go by Jay Marksman on the Internet. I used to work as a senior 3D artist at Frozenbyte (best known for the Trine series, though I was in the art team for another title, Starbase), and now I'm trying my hand at solo game development. I've been making small games for a long time, but only released a few, probably most notably Plead with the Mountain God, a short horror-themed 3D platformer, which even got a limited physical release as part of the Super Rare Mixtape Vol. 2.
So your new game is an escape room styled experience. I've actually been a fan of the genre since the days of Mystery and Time and Space back in the early 2000s. What is it that inspired you to create an escape room game yourself?
The impetus was actually a conversation I had with my cousing while we were browsing the popular tags on games-stats.com. My cousin saw the escape room tag, and told me that he thought I could make a good escape room game. I hadn't played many digital escape room games myself (I knew of some, but the only thing that comes to mind that I had actually played is the Cube Escape series), but I *had* played escape room board games (mostly the EXIT series) and I had enjoyed the aha moments in those, so I was intrigued by the idea.
I also already wanted to make a small game as a sort of test to see if the Steam and/or Itch.io audience would enjoy my style of game, and a short escape room seemed like a pretty good fit.
With escape rooms I feel you can create some truly unique experiences both gameplay wise and with the story. The Zero Escape series (beginning with 999) is personally one of my all time favorite stories in any game, and it is something I still think about all these years later. Do you hope Escape from Mutation Station will be able to provide a similar lasting effect on people?
I'm thinking, or at least hoping, that my game will find a small core audience that really enjoys it. I would say it's more gameplay than story focused, but there are definitely things in the game that I would personally be excited to see and discover, so I'm hopeful that it will really resonate with at least a few people.
The game is short, and I know that will turn some people off, but I'm trying to make that short time as high quality and as intriguing as I can. My honest answer to if it will be able to provide a lasting effect or not is "I don't know." But I certainly hope so.
Prior to this interview, you mentioned Doki Doki Literature Club as being one of your favorites. I'm not going to spoil it for anyone, but that game had a REALLY unique mechanic to it. Are you planning on implementing something similar? As in, something that requires us to think outside the box (not necessarily in the same way)?
This is a hard one to answer, and I would love to discuss it, but for fear of spoiling either DDLC or my own game by accident, I will just say: Yes.
Escape from Mutation Station was shown off at the Indie Horror Showcase 2024, so that implies it is a horror game. Would you say it is more on the psychological side? Or will there be some "in your face" horror as well?
I actually asked them beforehand if my game was "horror enough" for the showcase, since I thought it might not fit, but they told me to submit, and I ultimately got in, which was awesome. In my submission I said it had "slight existential dread, and a couple of spooky reveals". So definitely more psychological, no "in your face" stuff. In other words, even people who don't like horror should be fine.
The game is planned for a release at either the end of this year, or early next year on PC. Would you be interested in doing a console version as well?
Console games were a huge part of my childhood (and I still play on console on occasion), so a console port would be super cool, but it completely depends on how well the game does. I have absolutely zero knowledge of porting or releasing on consoles, so I would have to pay for someone else to handle all that.
And finally, is there anything else you would like us to know about the game? Or anything you would like to tell our readers?
I would just like to thank everyone who has wishlisted the game so far, or spread the word about it in any way. Every wishlist, like, or repost really helps, and makes me more confident that this is something that people might actually want to play.
For additional information, here is the official announcement provided by Jay via his website. You can also learn more about the game, or to add it to your wishlist, by heading on over to the official Steam page today!
About Mutation Station:
Features
- Investigate your surroundings in first-person as you uncover clues to help you exit the peculiar room you are locked in.
- Think outside the box, and solve puzzles to discover the truth behind this strange evaluation you are a part of.
- Operate a computer to input puzzle solutions, to gather information, and to play games.
- A short experience intended to be completed in about an hour (though unraveling all of the game's mysteries might take a bit longer).
You may encounter occasional glitches in reality, but don't worry, it's all part of your evaluation.Escape from Mutation Station is a companion piece for Jay's upcoming genre-hopping mystery game Attack on Mutation Station. They share the same universe, but any other connections are up to the players to unravel.
Fun Facts
Escape from Mutation Station will be my (Jay's) first commercial game release in
8 years. The first, and last one for a long while, was And So It Was (originally released on Steam in 2016, now free on Itch), which is not a good game.
Escape from Mutation Station will release in 3 languages: English, Finnish, and Japanese. This is because these are the languages I personally speak. I will be writing/translating each version myself (with some proofreading help from a Japanese friend for the Japanese text).
History
In the summer of 2024, having started working on Attack on Mutation Station a couple of months earlier, my cousin pitched me the idea of making an escape room game (and when I say "pitched", I mean we were browsing the tags on games-stats.com and he said to me: "You could probably make a good escape room game").
I was intrigued by idea, and wanted to try to make one, but only if I could make the game relatively fast, as I was already working on another game. That's when I decided to set it in the same universe as Attack on Mutation Station. That way, I could use a lot of the same assets, and it would also work as a good way to market the next game in the, I guess now, series.
I didn't want to make a "traditional" escape room game, though, so instead of standard puzzles, I wanted to try and surprise the player by subverting their expectations in (hopefully) clever and interesting ways, in the way some of my favorite games (in this case, games such as OneShot, Doki Doki Literature Club, and Inscryption) surprised me.
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