Remember the first time you saw a wall covered in blood-graffiti and actually got scared? Remember how it used to pique your curiosity, wondering at the mystery of what drove some poor desperate, doomed Red Shirt to spend a pint of blood on “RESIST”?
Probably not, because it is the the most played-out shooter cliche of our time. Seriously, a grizzled white space marine told me the other day that he thought blood-painting was derivative and uninspired. Well, developer RuneStorm are on the case, and they’ve brought a mop and bucket.
The Youtube alpha gameplay video for Viscera Cleanup Detail shows just how much work goes into turning your gore-caked Ishimura back into a spic-and-span starship Enterprise.
The game was the product of a 10-day internal game-jam, and you can download the alpha here.
RuneStorm are also behind a PC melee deathmatch game called Rooks Keep, which you find on Greenlight here. I don’t know much about it, but I have to be optimistic about a studio that puts out a space-janitor FPS.
Also, level designers, you are on notice: rooms covered in blood are as dead as their former inhabitants. They are so dead that they’re recording audio logs about how dead they are and leaving them in improbable places.
(Thanks, Gaynor.)