Proteus Coming to PS3, Vita Soon, New Features Detailed

You drift towards a pastel island where everything sings as you pass.
The sky begins to darken and something in the distance catches your eye…

I’m Ed Key, one of the developers of Proteus along with composer David Kanaga. Proteus came out for the PC and Mac in January 2013 and had a fantastic reception from Edge, Eurogamer, IGN and many more. For something that started out as a weird experimental project between me and David, this was pretty mind-blowing, and it’s even crazier to now have the chance to bring it to PS3 and PS Vita with some brand new features that take advantage of Sony’s hardware.

Proteus is something like a constantly-remixing ambient album in the form of an immersive island world. It’s all about a particular feeling of wandering through nature alone, taking it in and getting pleasantly lost. Maybe it’s a little bit about magic and mortality too. Don’t expect tasks and scores and checklists – perhaps Proteus lurks somewhere on the shady fringes of what it means to be a game.

With the PS Vita and PS3 versions, we’ve been adding new ways to engage with – and remix – the world. Previously, all Proteus islands were purely random, but on Vita, you can now choose to generate an island based on your current geographical location and on both platforms you can generate an island for the current date.

Both features have a chance of generating an especially “wild” island with various tweaks and twists. The island at my house, for example, has weird purple sea, green sky in the evening and some pleasant (but still very purple) inland lakes.

We’ve also added a way for users to interact with the environment using the back touch screen — we’ll be talking more about this closer to release.

Curve are doing a fantastic job on the port, adding a lot of love and polish along the way. Playing it on PS Vita’s bright OLED screen is so nice, as is the experience of playing it a on big television through PS3. We’ve had a very positive response to the PlayStation version from people I’ve shown it to, and I’m happy to quote a friend here and say that it’s the best version of Proteus there’s ever been.