DestinyLeah
We at Rely on Horror have recently expanded our team, bringing back some of our earlier editors to help us cover more material. Everyone has their niche, and for several of us, that niche is indie horror. I focus almost exclusively on indie games, and I often find myself starting a post about an IndieGoGo or Kickstarter campaign only to wrap it up and find another campaign to cover. To keep crowdfunding campaign coverage streamlined, we have begun a weekly roundup to bring you news about new, ongoing, and completed campaigns that fit within horror and its many subgenres.
Crowdfunding Roundup will be divided into three sections: Completed Campaigns, which will update readers about campaigns we have touched on before, and whether they succeed or not; Ongoing Campaigns, are campaigns which have two weeks or less left until completion; and New Campaigns, which will look at new funding campaigns that have caught our eye. Exceptionally interesting campaigns may still be covered in their own posts, but the majority of our quick blurbs on crowdfunding campaigns will be found in the Roundup. Without further ado, here is our first Roundup for the previous week:
Completed Campaigns
Gibbous
It’s been a banner week for crowdfunding indie games, and we have updates on the final results of two games we’ve been covering over the last month. First up is Gibbous, a Lovecraftian horror with a touch of comedy. The campaign wrapped up at 123% of its goal, meeting several stretch goals and buoying the team for a the long development process ahead. The team took a moment from celebrating and drawing to chat with us about their take on horror and Lovecraft, which you can read here. Players will find themselves scrambling to get rid of the Necronomicon and fix their cursed cat, laughing all the way. Gibbous is planned for release in Summer 2017.
Ghost Theory
Next up is Ghost Theory, which wrapped up its second Kickstarter campaign on Tuesday. The development process for the game is much more intense than originally planned due to the amount of detail and technical finesse that Dreadlocks wants to put into the final product. Instead of taking the all too common route of stretching the funding and just finishing with what they had, the team went ahead with a second Kickstarter campaign, explaining the need for more funding and releasing some cool gifs and videos to show what they’ve accomplished so far. The campaign was successful, meeting the first stretch goal to include a documentary about the making of Ghost Theory when backers receive their games. The team released a video to thank the community for all of the support, and it shows that the idea for this game is in very good hands.
Ongoing Campaigns
Beholder
There are few interesting ongoing campaigns to look at, as well. Beholder is a game about a dystopian world in which you have no choice but to spy on your neighbors and report on their actions to the totalitarian government. You have a moral choice to make- do you risk your life to rebel against the state and save those around you, or do you follow the orders and save yourself at the expense of everyone else? The developer, Warm Lamp Games, is uniquely qualified to tackle this storyline from their home base of Barnaul, Russia, having all grown up behind the Iron Curtain. The game has ten days to go on Kickstarter and needs to raise $22,000 to complete the finishing touches before release this fall. Their campaign is located here.
Thirteenth Floor Simulator
Thirteenth Floor Simulator is a game being created on Unity by a solo developer. The premise of the game is that you wake up in your hotel room on the thirteenth floor, and everything veers a bit left of normal as you find yourself stuck in a nightmare you cannot escape. There are corpses arising from body bags around you, and they seem to want to cuddle. Considering you aren’t supposed to talk to strangers, cuddling dead ones is definitely in the no-fly zone. The goal of this Kickstarter is to fund production of the game, including bringing in a more experienced developer to help polish it up. The idea shows a lot of promise, and the developer is only asking for $15,000 to bring it – and its demons – to life. Based out of Alabama, solo developer Adrian has released a gameplay footage trailer to give backers a feel for the game, and has a full roster of backer rewards. The campaign can be found here.
Daesin
The last ongoing game we will look at this week is Daesin, a two-dimensional puzzler being developed by a small team from France. In Daesin, players must literally use their heart to defeat obstacles, making sure not to part from it too far or face certain death. You’ve been called heartless by the girl you love, and now you have to prove that is not the case. You definitely have a heart- you just used it a moment ago to trip a lever. Dead End Studios is a five-person team who have worked hard to create a fully playable game, using a physics engine created by the author of the story, Jeremie Peulet. They have a beta version of the game, and would like to polish it and bring it to market. The team is asking for $30,000 to complete the game satisfactorily for release, and have nine days left to do raise the funding on their campaign, located here.
New Campaigns
Demoniaca
Demoniaca is a retro-style platformer in which players take on the roll of a well endowed woman who was killed in the night, and awoke to find herself disemboweled, undead, and unhappy. Overcome with a deep need for revenge and an even deeper need for a larger bra-top, she battles the minions of darkness and builds a team of busty women to bring the 80’s back to gaming. If funded, Demoniaca will be available in two formats, one of which has the ladies fighting monsters in the nude, and one of which has them fighting in clothing that might as well be the nude. If Castlevania, Metroid, and Playboy Magazine had a baby, this game might be it. Demoniaca is being developed by Mnemosyne, a new indie team based in Viareggio, Italy. They need $17,096 to complete the game, but with more than $5,000 already pledged and a month to go, they will likely be looking at the stretch goals very shortly. Among these goals is a $78,156 goal that would bring the game to both PS4 and PS Vita, expanding from the current platform of PC, Mac, and Linux. The campaign can be found here, but maybe don’t view it at work.
Kickstarter was low on new campaigns for horror video games, though there are a plethora of tabletop games and LARP guidebooks that have plenty of time left on them, for people interested in those game formats. I will be scanning IndieGoGo along with Kickstarter in the next week, but readers and developers are welcome to submit campaigns they think we should know about. Tweet us, email us, or give us a shout on Facebook.
