Sonderlust Studios is a new independent game developer made up of an experienced team with backgrounds from across the games industry. Our team has worked at Klei, Campo Santo & Ubisoft, on beloved titles including Firewatch, Far Cry 5 & 6, Mark of the Ninja and Don’t Starve (just to name a few)! We’re a group of people who love stories, and the potential games have to make us consider the lives we live, and push us to be better. Our first project as a studio—an unconventional systems-driven narrative game—seeks to accomplish just this.

Sonder is described by John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows as “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you'll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.”

Sonder is the realization that everyone has a story.

This haunting, beautiful realization—that our lives and the people in them contain more complexity than we can possibly perceive, and that we can only catch glimpses of it through the tiny lens of our own limited human experience—is a feeling we’re capturing in our games. We need games that challenge us to consider the complexities of the world and our role in it, as the player in our own lives.

And thus, as a team we are Sonderlust: yearning and building towards that feeling of accessible complexity, realizing we aren’t always the protagonist, but never squandering the opportunity when we find that we are.