At the end of last year, I announced that OWLMAN was undergoing a significant overhaul of its original content, which quickly evolved into something more like a remaster. In fact, that overhaul has been just nearly feature complete for around six months now, so I felt it was owed that it be made available before year's end in 2024 (just missed Halloween ːsteamsadː ).
This version is much closer to the original vision for the project than the release version, though there's still a lot more to explore here. There's a fair bit of cut content here due to time constraints, as the focus shifted to improving the core game concepts and enhancing the visuals and atmosphere. Content-wise, the overhauled OWLMAN should still take around or under an hour to find all three tapes.
OWLMAN has always been a very experimental project for me personally, so there will likely still be some rough edges (please feel free to leave any feedback or bug reports in this post).
Here's an outline of what's new:
- Totally overhauled map layout, with more remarkable points of interest to aid players' sense of direction. Getting a bit lost in the woods is intended, but now players should have a better indication of where to go.
- Enhanced visuals- respecting look a feel of the base game while being significantly more atmospheric.
- Completely remade the found video tape scenes, now featuring much more compelling sequences.
- Revised concepts of the gameplay loop- no more trial-and-error survival-horror-lite. Horror is more scripted and no longer relies on unreliable roaming AIs.
This is what content was cut from the game and what still needs to be worked on:
- The very annoying and under-developed cave section
- The crazy wacky uncontrollable car.
- Infinite Chase mode for not providing much of value to the game overall. (Open to exploring a Free Roam mode in the future.)
- UI post process layer for increased VHS authenticity.
- Currently there are no major changes to the menu system (It's on the list. Also looking into Steam Overlay).