First Singapore-Made PS3 Game ‘Page Chronica’ Hits Stores Today

This is a big day for Singaporean game developers Red Hare Studios as the team will release a Playstation 3 game called Page Chronica today. It was scheduled to hit the stores on November 1st, but due to unforeseen technical issues with the Playstation Network, the release date was delayed until today. The game is touted to be the first ever original concept game made in Singapore, while Straits Times reported that Page Chronica as Singapore’s first Playstation 3 game title to hit the stores.

Wee Lit Koh, the producer of Red Hare Studios, described the Page Chronica’s gameplay as a mix between Scrabble and Mario Bros. You will play as a librarian, Topez, who accidentally released an evil entity called The Big Bad that corrupted the world. The game plot then centers on Topez cleansing the world from the evil menace.

Interestingly, Page Chronica’s side-scrolling gameplay allows players to create words from the letters spread across the game to make various kinds of attacks. The longer or more complex the word is, the attacks become more powerful and can allow players to use more skill sets. Wee explained that the game uses a “word tree” which was constructed by collecting common words in British and American English with length of between two to seven letters. He estimated that there are around 10,000 words which are available to be used on the game.

Page Chronica targets several types of players: core gamers, platform gamers, and word puzzle gamers. The team’s main target is primary and secondary schools kids, emphasizing that children with such exposure to English vocabulary will help reinforce their command of the language. He explains his reason for including a local two-player mode:

With this feature, we hope that it will be kids who first introduce this game into the living room. Once this critical breakthrough is achieved, we will expect more people including [more mature] word puzzle lovers to embrace the game.

The team had great fun developing Page Chronica for the PSN platform, and they are looking to build more titles on the console moving forwards. Wee adds:

Engaging the media and the gaming community is our top priority, so that we can develop even better games in the future.

Page Chronica is available now for Asia, while gamers from the US need to wait until December 4th to get their hands on the game. For more information about Page Chronica, you can check out pagechronica.com.