Brazilian studio Senscape is keen to make another HP Lovecraft adventure game, and is turning to Kickstarter to help fund it. They’re asking gamers to reach into their wallets to donate a minimum of $250 000 (that’s around R2.8 million) towards its development. And should the campaign prove successful, they’re going to turn the game into a series.
Senscape has a pretty good adventure game track record, with founder Agustín Cordes having contributed to the very atmospheric horror-adventure Scratches back in 2006 at developer Nucleosys before he moved on to found Senscape.
The Kickstarter pitch video shows off Cordes’ passion for the genre and the studio’s odd Brazilian sense of humour, as well as some in-progress footage of the game. It’s going to be called The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which Lovecraft fans will know as a short novel that was published after his death. It centres around Charles Dexter Ward and his unhealthy obsession with his occult-dabbling ancestor, Joseph Curwen.
Here’s what the studio is saying about its commitment to making the game as true to the source material as possible:
“Following repeated readings of the story over the past year, we have absorbed its mood, analysed its structure, and taken copious notes. Every aspect of the novel has been exhaustively researched, and we have the assistance and expertise of S. T. Joshi to ensure we get historical facts straight and bring Lovecraft’s vision to video games as faithfully as possible.
We even meticulously considered Lovecraft’s entire output of fiction to understand how Charles Dexter Ward fits into that chronology and how certain aspects of his popular cosmology evolved over time.
The game is already fully designed, and we know for a fact that you’re going to love it. The best way to describe it is as the long-lost classic horror game by LucasArts.”
If there’s one way to hook adventure gamers in, referencing the spirit of LucasArts is it. Donations start at $1, but if you want an actual copy of the game, digital copies start at $15 (R170 0r so). There are a limited number of these available (5939 of 6660 at the time of writing), and once they’re gone you’ll need to contribute at the $20 (R230-odd) level. If this sounds like your idea of a good time, now’s the time to back.
The projected release date of the game is December 2015, but if my own experience with Kickstarter has taught me anything it’s that they probably won’t hit that date and will instead release sometime in 2016, game development being the complicated beast it is. Still, this looks well worth waiting for.
[Source – Kickstarter]
