You cruise you lose in this permadeath horror
It’s dark and we don’t know the difference between our breath and the terrified panting of the man abandoned on a cargo ship with only a monster for company.
We managed to slam the locker door closed but it’s out there. Somewhere. We can hear it thundering through the corridors. Peering through the slats doesn’t help. Maybe we’ll just wait in here a little longer…
Welcome to Monstrum. We’ve kept an ever-watchful eye on this since we featured it in IndieMaster back in issue 280, and now it’s sneaked into our nightmares via Early Access. If a randomly generated game of cat and mouse with only a torch for company sounds like it’s up your terrified street, then welcome to this permadeath nightmare. The aim of the game is simple: escape the ship, but only if the monster or the tension doesn’t get to you first.
“I suppose the main reason was that we wanted to make a replayable horror game, something that was always going to be scary any time you played it,” explains director Jaime Cross. “With other linear horror games you have the sequences and setpieces that are effective in frightening players, but their impact is lessened on repeated playthroughs. And that’s assuming there’s a reason for you to go back through the game. Grant, the guy who originally pitched the idea, wanted something like Binding Of Isaac-meets-Amnesia in terms of smashing two games together to try to make something new.”
Cabin fever
If you think it sounds like a xenomorph fancied a cruise then you’d be right. “Probably the most obvious [influence] is Alien, and early in development we were pitching it as ‘Alien, but on a boat!’, or ‘Jaws in space, but at sea’. Then Alien: Isolation was announced and sent the heebies up us before it even came out!” says Cross.
“Things like Call Of Cthulhu: Dark Corners Of The Earth and Spelunky were also flung around during the concept phase. The former for its interesting (and somewhat buggy) ship level, and the latter for more gameplay stuff.”
Exit plan
Exploring the maze-like craft on one of our braver runs, we find a lifeboat on the deck requiring parts, and a submarine in the bowels of the ship that can be repaired in order to make a proper run for it. Yet it’s finding the tools for the job that’s difficult and involves exploring deeper into the impressively decayed ship. It doesn’t help that after each unfortunate death everything shuffles around like a hellish ball and cup puzzle.
“The only real constants are the escape routes, which are always in the same place even if the route to them has changed completely,” says Cross. “So corridor layouts, trap placements, item placements, room layouts… They all get swapped around. There’s also the case of the monster too, as we’ll have a pool of three for the full release and you don’t know what one you’re up against until you encounter it. So even tactics get swapped around!”
State tomb
Ah yes. The monsters. We encounter both of the currently available ones on various doomed runs. One is a hulking brute with flames escaping its head like a hellish searchlight, the other is significantly scuttlier but equally terrifying. “The monsters are all AI-driven and are always active somewhere on the ship, so there are no pre-scripted pop-scare moments or events. You’re never really ‘safe’ in that regard,” we’re warned.
“They are always trying to track you down and will react to things you do. So if you’re running around all over the place or making a lot of noise operating machinery, they’ll head towards that source. But you can also turn that against them, and set up distractions to lure them away from an area you’re wanting to search or fix up safely. There’s running and hiding as a last resort, but sometimes that doesn’t go so well either…”
It’s tricky but, like something in the addictive vein of Binding Of Isaac, it’s immediately compelling enough to try again. “We really took on board the ethos of ‘tough but fair’, balance-wise,” says Cross. “We want the game to be hard to complete while avoiding cheap deaths, basically making sure that the player doesn’t feel cheated when they die. Some of this is down to learning the mechanics of the game, which may make it a little daunting to newcomers until they get a hang of things. We’re hoping that successful runs will take around 45 minutes each time. But yeah, most people will die a lot. Even we do all the time!”
It’s an impressively tense experience, and with a monster still be added when the game leaves Early Access, it’s quite likely that our runs are going to be as doomed as the Titanic for the foreseeable future. We might just stay hidden in this locker, thanks.