Playing at another pace

Mythonauta moves when you walk, and only then. There is nothing to do every day and nothing to lose if you take your time coming back. There is a long road, a story you half know, and the question of what lies a little further on.

01What it means

Playing at another pace is letting a story last as long as your walks do. The Odyssey, here, is 1,150 kilometres. On foot that is months, and there is no way to buy kilometres to shorten them. We like it that way: a long story is remembered differently when each page took a while to reach.

We want you to come back because you are curious.

We sometimes call it, half joking, "anti-dopamine". It is not a scientific claim and it has nothing to do with what goes on in your head. It is our way of asking whether a game needs constant rewards, manufactured urgency and pressure to return. We think not always, and that there is room for one that simply waits.

02Four ideas

03How it shows in the game

Ideas are worth little if they cannot be seen. This is what the app does today, checked feature by feature.

• You move forward without opening it. The app reads what you have walked from Apple Health, in the background too. There is no start button and no need to carry the phone in your hand.
• There are no streaks. No counter of days in a row. What you have walked is not lost by a day away, does not expire and does not go backwards.
• There is no countdown. No timers, no lives, no daily bonus, no reward that vanishes if you are late.
• Notifications speak of what you have already walked. You get one when your steps open a chapter and one when you finish a route. None is sent because you have been away, and between ten at night and eight in the morning nothing sounds.
• Short moments are offered. They appear as a note over the road: "Tap to read, or carry on walking." Put it aside and it waits in your journal.
• Some pages end with a question. It is called "A quiet question" and it has no box to answer in. It is for the next stretch.
• Everything you have read can be read again. It stays in your journal and works offline.
• You pay once. Routes are one-time purchases, with no subscription, and the purchase screen always has a "Not now". There are no ads, no accounts and no analytics either.

What keeps you company

You always know where you are: how many kilometres you have done, how many are left and how far the next chapter is. It is not a grade and not a daily target. It is what a milestone at the side of the road would tell you.

And you do not walk alone. Characters from the work come along, with you and at your pace: if you stop, they wait, and they arrive when you do. There is no ranking and no one to beat. If you would rather go without company, they can be hidden in Settings.

A few keepsakes stay along the way too: the objects each story leaves you and eight achievements that mark moments, such as the first kilometre or the arrival. They are kept once and are not lost.