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Holding On: The Troubled Life of Billy Kerr is coming from Hub Games, the designers and publishers of Rory’s Story Cubes and Untold Adventures Await. Telling stories through games is something they’re known for, but the theme of Holding On seems like a huge step outside of their previous games.
Gamers should not be concerned though, as Holding On has been demoed at the UK Games Expo, Origins and GenCon with amazing feedback and is a hotly anticipated game for us as a result.
The Gameplay
Holding On is a co-operative campaign game, where players work as nursing staff tasked with providing care for the terminally ill. Your latest patient has been rushed in following a massive heart attack on a flight from Sydney to London.
When the game begins, all you know is this - his name is Billy Kerr, he is 60-years-old, and he has been given days to live. The co-operative mechanisms of the Holding On game are light, but you are working against a deck of cards which will throw you medical emergencies as well as opportunities to talk to Billy about his memories and try and piece together his past.
You gain partial memories throughout the game and piece them together as a jigsaw, and eventually you find the right lucid moments to push Billy to tell you the full memory. The art style for these memory cards is fantastic with the full memory revealing the clear picture from what is a board brush stroke, fuzzy image in the fragmented memory.
There are 10 scenarios in the full game and each promises to build on your knowledge of Billy's life as you learn more throughout the game.
Holding On: The Troubled Life of Billy Kerr - Coming Soon
After playing the first scenario at the UK Games Expo I’m really eager to try out more and find out more about Billy. Holding On does a fantastic job of enabling you to get invested in the character and I’m interested to see how new game mechanisms unfold to allow you to piece together his history.
If you’re a fan of co-operative games, legacy-style games or narrative games, or if you want a refreshing experience in terms of the game’s theme, then Holding On is definitely worth looking out for during Autumn 2018.
