I've been working in games for a little more than 15 years, and the main thing I'd say about it at this point is that it's a pretty annoying job to explain at parties. People often say something like, "Oh, I don't really play games," which is surely an odd thing to tell a game designer moments after you've been introduced; I don't really eat croissants, but that's not the first thing I bring up if I meet a patissier. So one of the joys of publishing my first novel last year was the option to sidestep all of that, and say: "Oh, I'm a writer." I wrote a novel; I'm working on another one; job done, the conversation can move on. Nobody says, "Oh, I don't really read books," even though that's at least as likely to be true.

In the early 1980s, the psychologist Harry Heft put a 16 mm camera in the back of a sports car and made a movie. It consisted of a continuous shot of a residential neighborhood in Granville, Ohio, where Heft was a professor at Denison University. It didn't have a plot or actors, but it did have a simple narrative: The car started moving at 5 miles per hour and made nine turns from one street to another and then came to a stop after traveling just under a mile. One showed just the vistas along the route, the expansive layout of environmental features, such as a group of houses or trees seen from a distance. The second film showed the transitions of the route, the parts between each vista where the view is occluded by, say, a turn in the road or the crest of a hill.

"The game isn't going to tell you if you got that right." It's an ominous way to start a game demo, but one I'm not too surprised by after playing 80 Days and Sorcery! Heaven's Vault is Inkle's new game, and I met up with studio co-founders Jon Ingold and Joseph Humfrey recently to get some hands-on time. At first glance it's a huge step away from Inkle's previous games--where 80 Days and Sorcery mostly played out in text, Heaven's Vault features fully navigable 3D environments. Your character Aliya Elasra is 2D though, her movements more suggested by a series of still frames than fully animated.