Description

Out of Body is a block-pushing puzzle game where death isn't the end of a level, it's the first step to solving it. A hooded stranger offers you a deal: mend broken souls in exchange for helping your sick child. Collect lives to turn into a ghost, possess skeletons, and carve yourself a path to reach the goal with your original body. Chart your own path through 100+ handcrafted levels, some optional, some required, in a branching overworld that lets you choose your own route forward. Every solution starts the same way: you have to die first.

History

Out of Body started as a Global Game Jam 2021 prototype. The little jam game got a better reception than expected: streamers picked it up, players asked for more, and Jacques-Yves Thomart and Arnaud Valensi decided to turn it into a real game. The plan was a year of work, maybe two. Five years later they are still here, working on it in the evenings and on weekends, and carving out months of full-time development whenever they can. Along the way they were accepted into the closed beta of Jai, the programming language created by Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness), and built their engine from scratch with it. Every sprite is drawn by hand, with no generative AI art. Both grew up in the 90s on retro games, and that era shaped the whole project. Shipping their first retro game is a childhood dream come true.

Features

• Death is a tool: sacrifice yourself to become a ghost, then possess skeletons and other creatures to keep going.
• Every possession plays differently: each possessed creature has its own interactions with the environment, and some have a unique way of moving.
• Elemental interactions: skeletons catch fire and ignite objects, fire melts ice, rain puts out the flames.
• 100+ handcrafted levels, some optional, some required, in a branching overworld that lets you choose your own route forward.
• Retro top-down pixel art, drawn by hand, with an engine built from scratch by the team.