Datura Official Trailer Released

Forgive me for the lack of Youtube link, but I can only find the official version on Vimeo at the moment and rather than wait for a Youtube version, I'll roll with it and probably strike this out.  Anyways...

So, Datura, 'that floating hand game' has an official trailer (what is this, friggin' trailer week?) now that is quite different from all the teasers we've seen so far and I'm....not quite sure what to think about it.  I'm just going to preface the whole post with that fact because I mean, the entirety of the reason I -liked- Datura from the start was because it seemed so different.  But now that we kind of have a clearer picture, I'm getting a little concerned at just how different the game appears to be, though from the group who made Linger in Shadows being involved probably should have tipped me off a little and a little earlier than now.  The trailer is more or less all over the place both literally and figuratively as one moment we see our floating hand protagonist in the back of an ambulance, and the next they're handcuffed in what I can assume is the back of a police van.  From there, the trailer goes on to take us to to the forest we've seen time and time before, the arctic, a hospital and a battlefield straight out of one of the world wars, perhaps.

Of course, that is apparently the whole point of the game, or at least that's what the GDC Footage taken a little while back would suggest.  In the video, it's explained that the Forest is sort of a 'hub' world from which the player will go to the different 'stages' after finding items of import.  After ripping the face off of a statue, the player finds a pickaxe that, when grabbed, transports them to the arctic area wherein the player has to choose between digging out a literal trophy (that I imagine grants a trophy in the final game) or a human being trapped under the ice.  It seems pretty black and white, and I don't know if the game is going to be static or if things will change based on your decisions, but in the video, choosing the person leads to the ice breaking and the player being submerged in the icy waters.  So it's quite possible that Black and White are not quite what they seem, which I would certainly hope is the case, as well as it being touched up with randomness or, again, developmental impact from choices.

Still, as the game gets nearer and nearer, I start to wonder if it's going to be a game that you can play with both hands, or if the (seemingly cumbersome) single Move Wand control scheme (barring using a dualshock) will be the only way to go.  With it saying you can 'explore', that's precisely what I want to do; I want to be able to use a Nav Controller to walk around like normal instead of looking in a direction and pressing Triangle to advance or whatever wonky sort of movement scheme shown off there.  Beyond that, the game doesn't look quite as tight as I would hope for, having a second or so lag between movement of the Wand and movement on the screen.  I suppose I just feel like I can feel all my excitement draining away for the game because it's not seeming like it's going to be what I expected or, perhaps, what I hoped.  Instead, it might simply be a really artsy game that uses the Move Wand to try and justify the peripheral.

I guess we'll find out soon enough, though, as the game is rumored to release on May 9th in the UK.  Of course this doesn't mean a lot, as SCEE and SCEA aren't quite the best at coordinating things between each other so SCEE stores sometimes see games come out weeks or even months after the SCEA folks have played it, beaten it and moved on.  Similarly, SCEE has had a couple games (not many, just a couple) come out without so much as a word for an SCEA release.  So while the ideal scenario would be that it comes out on May 9th in PAL regions, with May 8th or the following Tuesday being NA's release date (with a demo), I can't say that's going to be the case for sure, nor should Joystiq.  But, eh, they kind of do that a lot and oh well.  We'll just see what happens because there's not that much time between then and now, and I expect to see details relatively soon!