Odyssey

Odyssey is a science adventure in which you navigate a group of Caribbean islands in search of Kai, a 13-year-old girl, and her family, who are stranded and waiting to be rescued. You solve puzzles using clues in fragments of Kai’s journal, while following her story and learning the history of astronomy and mechanics from ancient Greece to Galileo. The game includes a significant amount of reading.

Kai’s journal

Kai’s archaeologist father was excavating valuable Carib artifacts on the uninhabited Wretched islands when the family had several unpleasant encounters with sailors. After the last encounter, the family’s boat and radio are smashed, leaving them stranded. The sailors believe Kai’s father has found valuable artifacts, including treasure, and give the family only a few days to turn them over. The family expects the sailors to return, while hoping rescuers can reach them before the father’s graduate students arrive within a month.

The family puts up barricades across the islands to buy time. Kai tears up her journal and hides its fragments around the islands, placing clues relevant to each puzzle near that puzzle. The journal records what happened to the family and Kai’s intellectual journey: conversations with her father about astronomy and physics, her own observations and experiments, and physical models she builds with her brother Sid. In these pages, Kai debates and challenges her father’s ideas.

Puzzles and science

The puzzles follow the chronological development of ideas in astronomy and mechanics. As you explore the islands, you work through a systematic sequence of scientific history, using the relevant journal fragments to solve puzzles.

The Early Access release covers the first three chapters:

• Chapter 1: The origins of science and the shift from the Pre-Socratics’ flat Earth to Aristotle’s spherical Earth and physics.
• Chapter 2: The shift from Ptolemy’s geocentric universe to the heliocentric universe of Copernicus and Galileo.
• Chapter 3: Galileo’s dispute with followers of Aristotle over free-fall motion. The chapter ends midway through Galileo’s physics.

The planned continuation covers Galileo’s mathematics of uniformly accelerated motion and one-dimensional kinematics in Chapter 4, his ideas about inertia and the mathematics of projectile motion and two-dimensional kinematics in Chapter 5, and Newton’s three Laws of Motion and Universal Gravitation in Chapter 6.