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Journey to the Emerald City turns the Oliver Twins’ puzzle-solving heritage into a screen-free Oz adventure packed with cards, clues, and tactile surprises.
A New Kind of Journey Begins
The Oliver Twins are stepping away from conventional video games and inviting players into the Emerald City with nothing more demanding than a book, a deck of cards, and a curious mind. It’s a wonderfully old-fashioned idea in an age of glowing screens and permanently anxious battery icons.
Known for creating the Dizzy games, Philip and Andrew Oliver have announced Journey to the Emerald City, a story-driven adventure designed for players ages eight and up. It will be the first release in their planned Active Brain Games series, a line built around reading, investigation, and puzzle-solving rather than reflexes.
There’s no display to stare at, no controller to master, and no familiar scramble for a charging cable five minutes before the adventure gets interesting. Instead, the game asks players to turn pages, examine objects, interpret clues, and make progress through a physical world laid out on paper and cardboard.
A Video Game Without the Video
That central idea sounds simple, but it has a particular charm. The Oliver Twins describe Journey to the Emerald City as “a video game with the video removed,” which is a neat way of explaining the project’s unusual balance.
The structure is intended to feel familiar to anyone who grew up with classic adventures. Players will follow a route through a story, encounter puzzles, uncover hints, and use special items to push past obstacles. The difference is that everything happens through a beautifully illustrated interactive book and a collection of physical tools.
The book acts as the main guide through the adventure. It establishes the route, introduces the story, and tells players when to use different pieces from the box. The supporting items aren’t decorative extras tossed in to make the package feel heavier. They are part of the progression system, meaning the player’s physical actions should matter as much as the decisions made while reading.
That approach brings back a small but important pleasure that modern games often smooth away: physically keeping track of things. A card is not just an icon in an inventory menu. A cipher disc is not an abstract button prompt. You hold it, rotate it, compare it with the information in the book, and hope you’ve noticed the detail that matters.
What Comes Inside the Box
The planned set includes a surprisingly broad collection of adventure tools:
- An illustrated interactive book
- A 52-card adventure deck
- A sealed, double-sided map of Oz
- A cipher disc
- A pencil
- Three themed stickers
- A bookmark
Each component has a role in the journey. The book provides the narrative framework, while the cards and other items are introduced as the player travels deeper into the story. The sealed map is particularly intriguing because its contents are deliberately hidden until the right moment. That kind of reveal can create genuine anticipation, especially for younger players who haven’t yet become suspicious of every cleverly folded piece of cardboard.
The inclusion of a pencil is also a telling detail. It suggests that players may need to record information, work through clues, or interact directly with the printed material. Of course, I may be reading too much into one humble writing tool. Perhaps it will mostly sit beside the book while everyone argues over the cipher disc. Still, its presence reinforces the feeling that this is meant to be an active, hands-on adventure rather than a story people simply read from beginning to end.
The Familiar Appeal of Oz
The Emerald City is not a completely new destination for the Oliver Twins. They previously visited the world of Oz in Wonderful Dizzy, another adventure connected to their long-running history with the character.
That earlier connection gives Journey to the Emerald City a little extra weight. This isn’t simply a random licensed trip to a famous fantasy setting. The brothers have already worked with the world’s visual language and its mixture of wonder, danger, odd characters, and dreamlike locations.
Fans of Dizzy are also being promised a few surprises. The exact details have not been revealed, but the project may include special cards or locations connected to the familiar egg-shaped hero. That possibility is enough to make the box feel like more than a standalone Oz puzzle book. A small reference can go a long way here. Retro players are experts at spotting that one character, symbol, or location tucked into the corner of an otherwise unrelated adventure.
My first reaction was that this sounded like a modest side project: a pleasant activity book with a recognizable name attached. Looking closer, I’m less convinced that description fits. The combination of a branching-feeling story, physical clues, a hidden map, and a dedicated card deck suggests a more deliberate experience. Whether it achieves the satisfying rhythm of a classic adventure game is still uncertain, but the ingredients are at least pointing in the right direction.
A Campaign With Something to Prove
The crowdfunding campaign is scheduled to open on September 29, 2026. For now, only a preview page is available, with an option for interested players to receive a notification when the campaign begins. The creators have not yet announced the funding target, final package prices, or the rewards planned for backers.
Those missing details matter. A tactile adventure can look wonderfully inviting in early artwork and still become awkward if the production plan is too ambitious or the final box is priced beyond the families it hopes to reach. The age recommendation of eight and up gives the project a broad audience, but that also means the rules and puzzle design will need to walk a careful line. Nobody wants an adventure so easy that children breeze through it, yet a puzzle that leaves everyone staring blankly at a cipher is not much fun either.
The Oliver Twins are also returning to crowdfunding after Dizzy Returns, their previous independent campaign from 2012, failed badly. That history makes the next campaign especially important. A more polished presentation and a realistic funding goal would give Journey to the Emerald City a much better chance of reaching the table.
There’s no point pretending the earlier failure doesn’t cast a shadow. Crowdfunding rewards enthusiasm, but it also punishes vague planning and overreach. I hope the team has learned from that experience. The concept is distinctive enough to earn attention, and it would be a shame if the campaign stumbled before players ever got to open the sealed map.
Can the Artwork Match the Idea?
The visual side may become the project’s biggest question mark. The Oliver Twins have already made substantial use of generative tools through their RichCast service, and the results there have not always looked convincing. That raises an awkward concern for a product whose appeal depends heavily on printed artwork and physical presentation.
A book-and-card adventure needs images that invite inspection. Players should want to study a location, recognize recurring details, and feel that the world has been carefully built rather than rapidly assembled. Generative imagery can produce plenty of surface detail, but surface detail isn’t the same thing as a consistent visual language. A character’s face changing from one illustration to the next would be more distracting on a printed page than it is in a quick online preview.
That said, the printed format may work in its favor. Paper has a strange ability to soften imperfections. A slightly odd background can become part of the object’s personality, especially when players are focused on solving a puzzle rather than judging every pixel. I’m skeptical about relying too heavily on automated art, but I’m not ready to declare the project doomed on that basis alone.
The real test will be consistency. If the artwork supports the clues, keeps the locations readable, and gives the Emerald City a coherent identity, it may do its job perfectly well. If it feels like a pile of unrelated images, no amount of clever card design will completely hide the seams.
Why This Retro Idea Still Works
There’s something appealing about a game that asks players to slow down. Classic adventures often made us sit with a problem because there was no instant hint button and no endless stream of walkthroughs waiting in the next tab. Sometimes that was frustrating. Sometimes it produced the best stories.
A physical puzzle adventure can recreate that feeling without copying the old inconveniences wholesale. Players can discuss clues around a table, pass the cards from hand to hand, and make discoveries together. Younger players can read sections aloud, while older players help interpret the more cryptic challenges. It becomes an activity with a shared rhythm instead of a solitary march through menus.
That social quality may be the project’s strongest feature. The book provides structure, but the table provides the atmosphere. One person notices a symbol. Another rotates the cipher disc. Someone else insists that the suspiciously ordinary-looking card is important. Suddenly, the adventure is no longer just printed content; it’s a little group mystery.
Whether Journey to the Emerald City can deliver the same sense of discovery as a classic video game remains unknown. The idea is promising, though, and it understands something important about retro play: the magic was never only in the technology. It was in the feeling of being handed a strange world and being told to figure it out.
Заключение
Journey to the Emerald City is an intriguing change of direction for the Oliver Twins. Its screen-free design, illustrated book, 52-card deck, sealed map, and cipher disc all point toward a tactile adventure that could appeal to both families and longtime Dizzy players. The campaign still has important details to reveal, and the artwork deserves careful attention, but the concept has a pleasantly curious spark. Would you rather solve this kind of mystery with a controller—or with a pencil, a card deck, and a table full of theories?
ЧАСТО ЗАДАВАЕМЫЕ ВОПРОСЫ
- What is Journey to the Emerald City?
It is a screen-free, story-driven adventure from Philip and Andrew Oliver, designed around an illustrated book, physical objects, cards, and puzzles. - Who is Journey to the Emerald City designed for?
The project is aimed at players ages eight and up, with an emphasis on reading, exploration, investigation, and problem-solving. - What items are included in the planned set?
The box is expected to contain an interactive book, a 52-card adventure deck, a sealed double-sided map of Oz, a cipher disc, a pencil, three themed stickers, and a bookmark. - Will Dizzy appear in the adventure?
The creators have hinted at surprises for Dizzy fans, possibly including special cards or locations, but the exact details have not been announced. - When does the crowdfunding campaign begin?
The campaign is scheduled to launch on September 29, 2026. Funding targets, package prices, and backer rewards will be revealed later.
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