DestinyLeah
Transylvanian indie developer team Stuck in Attic have launched a Kickstarter for their cartoony Lovecraftian game Gibbous, a comedy-horror take on the Cthulhu mythos. They’ve set an ambitious goal – just shy of $50,000- for the short timeframe allowed by Kickstarter, but have drummed up nearly half of the funding with nineteen days left. Backer perks range from wallpapers and reduced price digital copies of the game, to physical copies, inclusion in the game, to a 3D printed Kitteh figurine from the game. One of their backer levels is called “R’Lyeh Knows How to Party”. These guys are truly here to have fun, and that is a breath of fresh air in the absolute watershed of Lovecraftian indie games flooding Steam right now.
In Gibbous, you play a guy named Buzz, who has accidentally cast a spell from the Necronomicon that makes his cat capable of speech and sarcasm. Kitteh wants nothing more than to go back to her regularly scheduled catting, Buzz wants to go back to his life before the Necronomicon, some weird kid named Piscilla wants her fish doll back from the fishmonger so she can move to fish town with her very fishy-sounding family. This is only the beginning of the oddities, and you will find yourself pointing-and-clicking through conversations with all manner of people as you try to figure out what is going on, what isn’t going on, and how to make your cat act less like Daria.
Stuck in Attic have released a demo of the game to go along with the campaign, available for Windows, Mac, and Linux users. I played the whole demo, and had a ton of fun doing so. It brings everything but the bad laugh track to its campy horror-cum-comedy routine, and manages enough bad Cthulhu jokes to make any Lovecraft fan happy. The game runs smoothly,the voice acting is well done, and the art is entirely hand-drawn, 2D comic style. The demo is short and sweet, and seems be a good feel for how the game is going to play. The demo storyline is intriguing, and hints at some really weird goings on down on the coast, an area unavailable to you in the demo.
Coming fresh off of Dead Secret, I am excited for another horror game that is fun and light, while still being creepy enough to steal my New Orleans heart. If they manage to hit their goal, maybe Stuck in Attic can bring that to life with Gibbous. For those playing the demo, explore everything in the second area for a series of fun Batman references.
