Groundhog Day: Like Father Like Son will be a VR adventure game sequel to the movie
Over again
Ah, here we are doing the same thing over again – and yet, this one is different. Groundhog Day: Like Father Like Son is breaking the loop of movie sequels sticking to the same media format and will instead be a virtual reality adventure game.
You can see what’s old and what’s new, plus some cute little rodent friends, in the trailer.
Groundhog Day: Like Father Like Son will, as the name suggests, follow Phil Connors Jr., who falls into the same time loop as his father before him, repeating a single day over and over again.
“He's trapped back home in Punxsutawney, the small town he thought he'd escaped, where he can't even get a decent cappuccino,” says the game’s website, “and he's going to have to repeat the day over and over until he learns the true value of friends and family.”
Ironically, I feel like I’ve seen this “unlikeable man learns to be a decent person” plot once or twice or a hundred times before, right down to complaining about coffee being shorthand for “self-obsessed and shallow.”
Still, it’s being made by Tequila Works, who co-developed The Sexy Brutale, something that our Mat Jones called “Groundhog Day, the game.” Apparently it was good, too – Edwin Evans-Thirlwell also put it on his game of the year list for us – so handing them the actual Groundhog Day game seems more than appropriate.
They say that Like Father Like Son will involve navigating your way out of the time loop through "puzzles and branching narrative gameplay," and though it's a Sony joint it'll be coming to HTC Vive and Oculus Rift sometime this year.
Crucially, in the actual Groundhog Day ceremony yesterday, Punxsutawney Phil predicted that spring will be coming soon, so bless that cute little land beaver and cross your fingers they’re right.