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I don´t know if it was faith or a pure coincidence, but as you might already know, Steven Spielberg turned 70 years old just recently (to be exact. He celebrated his 70th birthday on the 18th of December. Well, to make a long story short. I grew up watching Spielberg ´s “E.T.” movie, so I´ve been a fan of his for many years. Furthermore, I got really interested in sci-fi and space thanks to Spielberg as well (Star Wars and Star Trek played a huge role on that front as well). So I got quite excited and thrilled when I noticed that IonLands (it´s a Berlin based indie games studio) of the truly cute inspired exploration survival game “Phoning home” (which of course is a spoof of E.T´s famous “phone home” quote) started to follow us on the same day that Spielberg kicked-off his 70th birthday.

I think it´s also safe to say that “Phoning Home” has “probably” been inspired by the “Star Wars” universe as well.

You see, “Phoning Home” (which is in development for MAC, Linux and Windows) seems to be inspired by both E.T. and “WALL-E” (which is another movie that I really like). So I got really interested in the game as soon as I found out about it.

“Phoning Home is an exploration survival game with a main character like no other. Join ION, a small but versatile little robot, on his biggest adventure yet. After crash-landing on an unknown planet his ship is almost completely destroyed. ION has to survive in this strange new world full of dangers, and if he’s ever going to escape he must find a way to signal his home planet for help. With only the ship’s A.I. for company, he embarks on the most important mission of his life. ION must phone home.” – IonLands

Yes, there will be action moments and battles in “Phoning Home”.

Furthermore, just the story alone made me want to explore and experience the world of “Phoning Home”:

Story:
ION has the ability to communicate with his ship’s intelligence, receiving important tips on how to survive and how to craft useful items from the random objects he finds. During his adventures he discovers a portal leading to another place. What will happen when he passes through it? Will it lead to another planet and to him losing connection with his ship? He decides to take a leap of faith and enter the portal. His life is forever changed when he meets ANI, another even smaller robot who needs his help. They face wild and dangerous creatures that don’t care much for small robots. They discover signs of a civilization, but find no intelligent life. What is the meaning of these portals? And most importantly, how can they get back home? From now on they will stick together to find the answers.

“Phoning Home” runs on the Unity engine, and so far things are looking really great.

I´ve also been told that you will be able to find a wide range of different collectible items that will allow you to unlock new items in the game. However, you will have to create the items yourself. Yes, you guessed it. You can craft stuff in “Phoning Home” (powerful lasers, shields and whatnot). Other than that, you also need to create power cells and fuel to replenish the energy that your thruster and other devices require to function. Which of course is easier said than done, since there are quite a lot of things out there that wants to kill you (yes, there will be battle moments in the game as well).

Say hello to the ship A.i (which would be ION´s friend and companion).

So I can´t say that I´m surprised to hear that “Phoning Home” got greenlit on Steam Greenlight in a rather short period of time, as quite a lot of people seem to love the game a whole lot. However, I am somewhat worried about the current status of the game. Especially since the original release date was said to be “early 2016″…Not to mention the fact that IonLands haven´t made any new updates on their Steam page since September last year (the devs have been rather active on their Facebook and Twitter page though). So I truly hope that the lack of Steam updates is because the developers have been crazy busy with developing “Phoning Home” (I will ask them about it asap!), because on a personal level. I really like what I´ve seen from “Phoning Home” so far (let´s just say that I like the idea of an adventure/action/shooter/puzzler hybrid that looks like a mix of E.T. and WALL-E ).

Simply put, I wish IonLands the best of luck with “Phoning Home”, and I hope that the game will see the day of light sometime next year.