It’s fair to say that, amongst the indie crowd anyway, first person puzzlers are making a big comeback. Taking their lead from classic titles like Myst we’ve seen games like Gone Home, and the upcoming Esther One and Master Reboot. Now Montague’s Mount steps up to join them.

Montague’s Mount is an atmospheric first person puzzler, set on an island in Ireland. Your character wakes up on the island following a shipwreck, and you’ll have to find out what happened and what the island has hidden before you can leave.

At the Eurogamer Expo I caught up with Matt Clifton from Polypusher Studios who is the developer for this wonderfully dark game.

“I guess you could call it an open word game”, Matt tells me, “it’s exploration, it’s open world enough for you to walk round most of the island, but the story is narrative driven so you can’t just go wandering off. The puzzles basically link the aspects of the story together. It’s only me doing it so it’s pretty contained.”

As I mentioned at the start, it’s clear that Myst is a strong influence on the development, but Matthew told me it wasn’t the only thing.

“To be honest it’s not really been games that have influenced me, back in college I was quite into photography and film production so films like Shutter Island, not necessarily for the content but the ambience and The Shining was another one, it was that sort of claustrophobic feeling. More cinema to be honest, but like I said Myst is one of all time favourites.”

As for the resurgence in first person puzzlers, Matt thinks it might just be a technical advantage.

“It comes down to small teams, as soon as you go into the first person realm, you don’t have to worry about character creation. When you’re doing game development doing all the character animations can take most of your time so by going first person you can side step that”

Montague’s Mount is Polypusher’s first game, so what made Matt decide to develop a game.

“I’ve always been one of those bedroom coders, but nothing ever got finished, my day job is more the business side of coding like database web engines. I moved to Ireland about 7 years ago, and the economy took a bad hit and I got made redundant two years ago, I was going to have to move to London or Dublin so I had a chat with my wife and decided to give it a go.

I originally said it would take 12 months, it’s not a hard game to make, but it always takes twice as long as you think it will.”

Being a one man developer can be a difficult job and as Matt puts it, he wears multiple hats, but not all of them are a perfect fit.

“One of the things I struggle with is the marketing and PR side; if I’m honest I’m more of a backroom guy than standing out the front, but then I met the guys from . When they came on board they never once said we need to change anything, they were more interested in helping especially with things like events so it’s been really good to have them here organising interviews and helping me out, it’s been a really good partnership.”

Montague’s Mount only had a small stand at Eurogamer, but they had a queue of over 90 minutes, that in some part is thanks to the Oculus Rift that Matt brought along with him.

“Indies are really embracing the Oculus, I started Montague’s Mount about 9 months before Oculus was mentioned. I backed them as a Kickstarter so I got the kit quite early on, and the extra immersion that it offers is just wow.

It needs to be done right, you can’t shoehorn it into every game, but for something like mine it’s a perfect fit.

The problem is, when I first started using it I could have it on for 5 minutes, and it’s getting better as I’ve become more used to it, and I know there are working on that. I guess at the moment we don’t really know which direction the end product is heading.”

Montague’s Mount was also playable at the indie game show Rezzed earlier in the year, Matt admitted that the bombastic showcase of Eurogamer Expo was a little bit different, but still positive.

“Events like this can give people a skewed idea of what the game is about because you do end up stripping a lot of the story away to give people something that’s playable, but people are staying around, they are playing through the whole thing so it’s been really positive

It’s a niche market, there aren’t a lot of new gamers who probably even remember Myst, and a lot of the other indie games here have gone for the pixel art style so we stand out, hopefully in a good way.”

With this being his first foray into development I could only end the interview with one final question, would he do it all again?

“It’s been hard, sitting in my ‘dev dungeon’ for 14 hours a day staring at the same piece of land is enough to sap anyone’s strength, but I don’t want to go back to the day job,. Maybe I’ll look at something else I can turn around in 9 months, but when you double that it’s over a year so, I guess ultimately it comes down to if the accountant, and more importantly my wife, let me.”

Montague’s Mount is available now on Steam, Get Games and GoG.com.

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