Rocketcat Games and Madgarden’s latest collaboration sounds crushingly unoriginal – a roguelike zombie game rendered in pixel art – but its pedigree suggests otherwise. Its creators have a habit of taking hackneyed genres and folding an irreverent, cartoonish charisma into them.
That’s exactly what they did with Punch Quest, a free to play infinite runner which hit the top of the App Store charts – and the headlines – last year. Rocketcat Games’ Kepa Auwae admitted at the time that it was way too generous in allowing Punch Questers to advance without ever needing to pay; it was downloaded over 600,000 times but still made little money in return. It was switched from free to paid, then back to free again, and updated to host a slightly more prominent in-game store. “Punch Quest did okay in the end,” Rocketcat’s Kepa Auwae tells us.
It hasn’t deterred Rocketcat from making free games entirely. Another title in the works, Wayward Saga, is a classic action-RPG with a free-plus-IAP pricing. But it’s likely Death Road To Canada will be paid. “We’re thinking $10 on PC, $5 on mobile, no IAP,” says Auwae.
He cites River City Ransom, Wasteland Kings, Dwarf Fortress, Rogue Survivor and The Walking Dead as influences on the new game, and there’s a dash of Oregon/Organ Trail in there too. Where it stands apart from those games is its approach to narrative. Players overseeing Death Road’s gang of survivors will partake in Choose Your Own Adventure-style decision-making. ”If you haven’t played King of Dragon Pass, maybe think of FTL’s choices, but more in-depth,” says Auwae.
The Choose Your Own Adventure element is something the studio has been developing for some time, and played a part in various other, ill-fated projects. The narrative is linked into the game’s more general exploration and looting, and there are, of course, randomized undead hordes to contend with. Survivors the player encounters along the way will also have randomised appearances and personalities.
Auwe prefers to term the game a ‘randomized permadeath road trip simulator’, but appreciates that these characteristics mean that Death Road will be compared to all of the other roguelikes emerging from the indie scene right now.
“It’s a roguelike in the modern use of the word, which just means ‘permadeath and randomized content,’ he tells us. “I’m not a huge fan of the term because it specifically means ‘like the game Rogue’. The term is being used to describe just two elements of the game, which is due to roguelikes oddly having a monopoly on permadeath and randomized content until it recently, finally became fashionable. I’m really glad this pair of game mechanics are becoming more popular outside of true roguelikes, and I’m hoping we come up with a better term for it.”
As with Punch Quest, Rocketcat and Madgarden’s talent for taking familiar genre tropes and, well, poking a little fun at them will extend into Death Road, too. It’s the same kind of that playful irreverence that inspired Punch Quest’s laseraptors and gnome cameos, and that same attitude will be threaded throughout the Choose Your Own Adventure part of Death Road, says Auwae.
“It’s something that’ll be missing from a lot of zombie games now that Dead Rising is going to be all serious and gritty,” he adds. “We want to carry the torch of games in this genre that don’t take themselves absolutely seriously. We’ll have more important decision-making than the serious zombie games due to permanent consequences to your decisions. We may not have a daughter-figure character played by Ellen Page or an Ellen Page knock-off. It was just too expensive.”
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