New studio developing party game inspired by Nova Scotia forests

Out of Office is a video game that features Atlantic Canadian forests. (Source: besszong)

Growing up in Nova Scotia, George Greer spent a lot of time camping at Nova Scotia parks like Kejimkujik. As the co-founder of a new video game studio, he’s paying tribute to those Maritime forests.

Greer, who started besszong earlier this year, said he and his team are developing “Out of Office,” a multiplayer party game set in the wilderness of Atlantic Canada.

“Nova Scotia is really underrepresented in games,” Greer said. “We wanted to make a game for ourselves.”

Greer started besszong, which is named after his great-great-grandfather Georges Besszong, with several former employees from Ubisoft Halifax, a studio that closed its doors in January.

“We’re an extremely talented group of developers,” Greer previously told CTV News Atlantic. “In the whole team, we have 60 years of experience.”

The new game puts players in control of office workers who are dropped off at a campsite as part of a mandatory company retreat. They have to work together to survive the wilderness and complete team-building activities.

“If any one player dies, it’s a permanent handicap to the other players,” Greer said. “It’s like enforced cooperative playstyle. It’s definitely a hot market right now for this style of game.

“We spent a lot of time playing these kinds of games escaping from the doom and gloom of the world, and at some point we decided we’d make one.”

The team recently put out a trailer for the game to build up engagement with potential players. Their next goals are to run a largescale playtest and meet with publishers.

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