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It’s time again for the weekly look into gaming Kickstarter campaigns, picking out a few that look interesting.
Our catch-up first with the previously covered Kickstarters brings an awful lot of good news this week. Most of the good news consists of campaigns that haven’t yet concluded but have either bypassed their targets or are pretty near reaching it. One campaign has also concluded successfully, and that one is Hellpoint. The other campaigns doing well are OtterBash!, Ashes of Creation, Forsaken Castle and Q-YO BLASTER.
However, there is one bit of bad news and that is a campaign that has finished having failed. This is The Unique Adventure, and there are no updates to talk about so it’s unsure whether this will be a continued project.
First we have a project that’s received a lot of media coverage already.
Project Rap-Rabbit is a game from the creators of PaRappa The Rapper and Gitaroo Man, coming together for a new rhythm-action adventure with story and more. The title is coming to PC and Playstation 4, and apparently had taken inspiration from the epic Rap Battles of History Youtube series to bring rap-inspired battle face-offs to the game. It has a lot of Japanese lore elements in there too, and ‘Project Rap-Rabbit’ will not be the final title of the game.
Project Rap-Rabbit has a £855,000 goal of which it has made £55,349 so far, with 35 more days to go.
spaceBOUND aims to add some twists to the puzzle-platformer genre. The game is a co-operative title, and because it’s set in space zero-gravity plays a part in the game. Two players play as astronauts bound together by a tether and having to work together to solve puzzles and explore the asteroid they are on. The co-op is both local and a direct connect online co-op so you can play with your friends all over the world.
spaceBOUND has a target of $1,000. It has 29 days to go, and has made $858.
Next up we have a point and click game with quite a title.
The End Is Nahual is described in the campaign’s sub-header as “a point & click game, full of minigames, action, bad puns and Mighty Pianos with existential problems.” So just your regular game then. You play as a character Jacob, described as the ‘antagonist’ as well as the ‘antagonist of the antagonist, Sammael’. During the game you will meet up with a bunch of characters who can help or hinder you, and play through mini-games.
The End Is Nahual has 26 days to go, and has made MX$ 43,040 of its MX$ 650,000 goal.
A game focused on ambiance, the game is full of exploration and fighting as gameplay mechanics. Another point-and-click, you led your character through this dark and somewhat unholy building, exploring the rooms and finding items to help you make your way through it… and maybe even discovering secrets along the way. According the the campaign page the game is “centred on its atmosphere, visual narration and mystery.”
The Salt Fortress has made €249 of its €5,000 goal and has 29 days to go.
So, the Steam Summer Sale might have just had its dates leaked out ahead of time. All thanks to Steamworks users, going against some of the rules that they’re supposed to read before signing up. Oops.
The dates say that the sale will run from June 22 to July 5, and were originally shown off in screenshots to the Steam subreddit by deliteplays and later backed up by fellow user Jelman21. Valve contacted Steamworks developers to let them know so they could prepare deals and bundles ahead of time, and the dates were meant to be confidential. Users were then added to Developer groups after gaining access to alpha and betas of games via Kickstarter and it seems that the ‘confidential’ part was unheard by the users who have leaked the screenshots. Whether this will have consequences is yet unknown.
Other than the dates though, it’s far to say we’re in the dark about the Summer Sale. We can only guess at what games could be discounted and by how much, but until we’re in the thick of it (or Valve themselves give us official information) it’s far to say we just don’t know what to expect.
Introversion Software released their game Scanner Sombre back in April, depicting the player exploring a save network using a VR headset – although it’s not an actual VR title. That’s set to change though as Introversion have announced that they will be bringing the game to both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive in the near future.
Speaking at PDXCon, co-founder of Introversion Software Mark Morris said that while the game is coming to VR it would be “nuts at the moment” to focus on VR-exclusive titles which is why they released Scanner Sombre onto other platforms first. He said that Introversion’s Defcon VR game was downloaded by “about seven people”, so he is convinced that VR-exclusivity is not yet a viable way to make a game successful. Now Scanner Sombre has a player base, they’re following up the PC game with the VR version.
“We deliberately didn’t want people thinking Scanner Sombre is a VR game” he said, noting that people would have avoided the game if they had pushed it as a VR compatible title from the off simply because they didn’t own a headset. Indeed right now VR headsets are still fairly pricey and game developers working on those platforms need to keep that in mind.
They’re hoping to have the VR-ready version of Scanner Sombre ready to go in about six weeks, so by the end of the month we’ll probably hear more about it. Until then, you can have a look and see what the fuss is about by finding the game on Steam for $11.99/£8.99.
