Emil: A Hero's Journey

Thanks for playing the prologue of Emil: A Hero's Journey!

STORY

After Nazi forces take his father away, 11-year-old Emil must use the only two things he has left—creativity and imagination—as he embarks on a perilous journey to find his father. Inspired by the true coming-of-age story of a Holocaust survivor.

GAMEPLAY

Emil: A Hero's Journey is a Cinematic 2.5D Puzzle-Platformer that combines intense action, stealth elements and creative puzzle-solving.
Play as Emil and Interact with the world to creatively solve puzzles and overcome obstacles. Time your actions such as pulling, pushing, climbing, crawling, hiding and much more to avoid danger and find Olek, Emil's father.

A personal note

During the midst of Covid, I remember being locked up in my apartment, playing Playdead's masterpiece INSIDE and being blown away by it's art, atmosphere and of course puzzles. After finishing it, I felt a burning inspiration to do something related, but with my personal twist. For some reason, INSIDE's dystopic world, combined with a young boy surviving all on his own, reminded me of something... I didn't know what it was at first but then I understood - It was the survival story of my grandfather, Avraham Hartzook, as a young boy surviving all alone in Europe during WW2, hiding and running from place to place to find shelter.
At first, I thought I would be good at creating video games if I was good at playing them. But after a year as a "one man band" and being part of my finals project at Tel-Aviv University, after doing code, animation and level design my self, I understood it would take me years to create something amazing and dealing with all this alone was very hard emotionally and technically.

From there, I luckily and happily paired with Afik Yaari (our Producer), Or Hadir (our Animator/3D artist) and later on Nadav Litver (our Technical Director) who we not only worked together but became close friends and a first circle for learning, guidance and more important, support group when times were tough (and they were).
Looking back at the creation process of Emil I can definitely say there were many decisions (game design, production, animation) that could have been done different, and yes there's always place to learn and improve. However, I think, that for our first serious game, I am so proud of us and wouldn't do anything differently if I would go through this journey again.

Eventually, Emil: A Hero's Journey the child of a unique mixture of almost two and a half years of sensitive-intensive question asking, the love or video games as a medium for storytelling, thorough research and entrepreneurship. As this is currently a short version of the game, I hope that in the future we will gather all together again to create more emotional-compelling games or even a full length version.
I truly hope this game (and maybe this little letter of confession) has touched you in some kind of way and I hope you will all be lucky as I was to pursue your dreams actively with the support of special friends and family.

If you read all of this,
thank you.
Ohad.