With roughly 2,000 games going live on Steam every month, finding the gems among the noise is tough. The Engadget Indie Pitch highlights smaller studio games that deserve attention. This time, it’s I’M YOUR HOST from Calligram Studio — an audio deduction game where you use a custom OS to restore lost podcast episodes.
Calligram Studio is a three-person team. Eleanor Summers handles art, Alexander Smith is the sound designer and composer, and co-founder Jigmé Özer does everything else. Phoenix Springs, their first game, took seven years to make. This time they wanted something more manageable — about two years in development and hopefully ready within months.
The game’s concept grew from Özer’s fascination with the bits that don’t make it into the final cut. The dailies, the bad takes, the footage left on the cutting room floor. “It’s like a liminal space between the worlds of reality and fiction,” he said. Players get a straightforward linear narrative through podcast episodes, but a parallel story emerges through discarded interviews, field recordings, and other audio clips.
Audio is central to the design. “If you close your eyes and listen to what’s around you right now, you can try to imagine it’s an audio recording for ten seconds,” Özer explained. “Who is talking, and what mood are they in? Where are they? Are they lying? These are all clues we pick up on in split seconds.”
Visually, the game leans into retro-futurism. Özer researched old UIs, especially no-frills scientific research software. He kept coming back to early Winamp and Avid — video editing software. “My film school had an old analogue copy with a big chunky purpose-built keyboard and jog wheel. It felt so tactile and tangible.”
On the business side, Özer had a blunt take on Steam’s revenue split. “It’s absurd that the sliding scale currently benefits AAAs, who pay a smaller fee the more units they ship. It feels completely backwards.”
When asked to sell the game in one sentence, Özer didn’t hesitate: “Think Her Story, but weirder.” I’M YOUR HOST is available to wishlist on Steam for PC, Mac, and Linux. Release date is TBA.
