Don't Starvealike The Wild Eight Drops A Demo
Made by actual Siberians
You are the only survivor of a plane crash. The only things you have with which to stay alive are the 98 different-but-similar survival games installed on your laptop. Which one will you play until hypothermia takes you?
The Wild Eight is the latest addition to those swollen tree-feeling, rabbit-hunting ranks, but while the setup is familiar - plane crash, cold, angry wildlife - there are a couple of enticing twists to the formula.
First is that it's primarily co-op, hence the Tarantino-esque title. Second is that it's throwing in another Lost theme - something supernatural or science-fictional is going on in addition to all that scavenging and crafting. Third is that, in co-op, one of the crash survivors is secretly psychopathic, with a taste for human flesh to boot. It's like Cluedo with cannibals, I guess.
The devs won't be familiar names, but apparently have some experience in the casual games sector and, perhaps more importantly, actually live in an freezing, bear-patrolled wilderness (the Sakha Republic in Siberia) so presumably aren't just pulling this stuff out of their ice-cold bottoms.
The Wild Eight's on Kickstarter, but unlike devs who think they can get away with that on name-recognition alone, they've gone the whole hog and put out an alpha demo in order to entice people. It lacks the multiplayer mode as yet, but I had a quick tinker with singleplayer and it's shaping up to be fairly solid.
Looks nice, in that minimal textures/big polygons way that's so common right now, controls seem pretty tight and I felt my body temperature drop a few degrees just from playing it, which seems important. I suffered a few mysterious insta-deaths, but I'm happy to put that down to either alpha status or not quite getting everything yet. Familiar fare, yes, but I think it's well-judged.
It's after $50k on Kickstarter and is over the half the way there with a fortnight to go. Give the demo a spin to see if you want to get involved, I guess. Release date is planned to be this December.