Hope Song comes home to a wrecked apartment. Her parents are gone, and the people she talks to are reluctant to help. In Hope in the City, she goes looking for them herself in Shenyang, where the places she knows can look a little different once she has a reason to pay attention.
In a November 5 piece for Xbox Wire, creative director Judith Cheung explained how the notebook works. Hope records observations from the places she visits and the conversations she has. You can put two of those observations together and see where the idea goes. Find a connection and you might have a new question for somebody, or a reason to visit somewhere else.
What happens when you guess wrong?
An early version had Hope give the same reply when two observations had nothing to do with each other. Cheung says the writers replaced that stock answer with a response for each pairing. A bad guess can now turn up a joke or a small hint. That's the detail that sold me on the idea. When a game treats every wrong guess as a dead end, I start trying combinations in order. If Hope has something different to say each time, I'd be much more inclined to try the two things that caught my eye.
The notebook also has more than a hundred sketches by Calista Antonio. Cheung describes Antonio using the game's 3D models to work out perspectives before drawing over them in line and digital watercolour. It makes sense for the pages to have a different look from the streets outside. They're things Hope chose to record.
Steam and Xbox now both list November 11. The game is coming to Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC and Steam, with a PC demo already listed on Steam if you want to see how the case begins.