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Use déjà vu to bridge realities in hard sci-fi psychological thriller The Gap

Nothing to do with the clothes store.

A promo image for The Gap, with the glitchy image of a man in three different poses at once, and a cityscape behind.
Robert Purchese avatar
News by Robert Purchese Associate Editor
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An intriguing-sounding psychological thriller called The Gap was announced during the Future Games Show this evening.

It's described as a hard sci-fi first-person narrative game set in 2045, not that the sci-fi elements are particularly apparent from the debut trailer. This shows you, a neuroscientist called Joshua Hayes, waking up on the floor of presumably your own apartment, with a voice - and written messages on the walls - telling you not to trust anyone. But you can't remember what is going on.

Hayes suffers from a rare genetic disorder that affects his memory, so the focus in the game is trying to recover those memories by re-experiencing them. The catalyst for this is déjà vu, triggered by objects that act like a bridge to a parallel reality to experience memories again. But there's tragedy hiding in your past, too.

Cover image for YouTube videoThe Gap - Announcement Trailer - Future Games Show Gamescom 2022
The debut trailer. Intriguing, isn't it?Watch on YouTube

The Gap is the debut game from two-person Slovenian studio Label This, and will be published by small Polish team Crunching Koalas, which has been around for a while, mostly porting and doing work-for-hire jobs on games like Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales, Darkwood and This War of Mine.

The Gap is coming to PC, PS5 and Xbox Series S/X, and Crunching Koalas tells me it's aiming for early next year.

The living area of a stylish apartment, with the sun busting through the blinds. There's writing on those blinds, telling the player not to trust people.
Most of this is taken from the trailer, so I'm not sure how in-game it is, but it could be. Stylish apartment, though - minus the creepy stuff obviously.
A bedroom almost completely in the dark with a board on the wall and many notes and tokens stuck to it. Someone is mapping something big. A photo of a husband and wife on their wedding day. A stylish apartment with the night sky outside casting a long, atmospheric shadow across it. Some kind of digital library, maybe, of a sci-fi kind. It's a mysterious room lit in blue.

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