The Occupation sets out to marry the walking sim with Deus Ex

We caught up with White Paper Games' Pete Bottomley as they'd just announced their next game - The Occupation. Announced the other day, The Occupation, is the next game from the team that gave us Ether One and it offers a quite unique premise as you take the role of a journalist, a whistle-blower in a 1980s Manchester. The team has set out to combine the narrative first-person approach with the sort of systemic gameplay you'd find in say Dishonored.

"It's a first-person narrative driven exploration game," says Bottomley. "It has elements of the immersive sim genre, though, so by that we mean, we like the world building, we like the system-driven and emergent gameplay of games Thief, Dishonored, Deus Ex."

"Games like Deus Ex, Dishonored, hugely inspire us, but we also don't do the combat, the power ups, the unlockables, that's not necessarily the kind of games we like creating," says Bottomley. "Somebody in the studio, this week, was saying 'what if we say to people we're mixing the walking simulator with a game like Dishonored?', like where is that convergence happening? What is the type of gameplay that gets created from that? And so because it's based in the 1980s Manchester we have a world, we have a building, we have a core set of mechanics and systems in the world. They can be mundane things. They can be changing the thermostat dials. They can be shredding pieces of paper in a printer. They can be getting information onto floppy disks and transferring it around. It's everyday interactions that you'd expect and hopefully brings some kind of systemic emergence from them in the way that they interact with each other. That's a very designery answer, but that's how we approach the gameplay."

At the face of it, The Occupation appears a very political game that could certainly be perceived as a reflection on current affairs, but Bottomley was keen to stress it doesn't force any sort of agenda on the player.

"Whenever we're making a game we want them to tell a story and that's not us trying to push a political agenda on anyone. We're not saying these are our beliefs, this is what you should think. It's more just opening up the conversation, the dialogue, and more than anything it is saying there's two sides to the story, no matter what you're hearing on one side there's always the other side that feels equally impassioned about these things."

The Occupation is currently only confirmed for PC, but Bottomley mentioned that there will be talks with console manufacturers to see where it may end up. He also stated that they're currently targeting release in Q2, 2018, but that this could very well change.