The Forest is a fantastic survival game, full of scavenging, building, and stoving in the heads of mutant cannibal monsters using a lump of firewood. Combine that with BioShock, the classic steampunk body horror where you upgrade your DNA by injecting yourself over and over again with a mysterious, glowing potion, and what do you get? You get Serum, an upcoming survival FPS that just got a new trailer, and is available now for your Steam wishlist.
The premise is eerie, if a little familiar. You wake up strapped to a hospital bed, being repeatedly injected with the eponymous, neon fluid. After finding everyone dead, you stumble into the wilderness, and have to scavenge supplies and crafting materials to build yourself a shelter, fashion weapons, and keep yourself topped up with serum lest your body start to fail. Your house is your safety zone, and you can build melee, ranged, and even serum-based weaponry while trying to solve puzzles and survive the outdoors as you race against the clock.
Oh yes, that’s the other thing. Like Jason Statham in Crank (jeez – it’s been a while since I made a Crank reference) your body has a kind of in built countdown, which means if you don’t keep yourself sufficiently serum-ed, and get to the bottom of what’s going on in time, it’s curtains. You can see more in the trailer below:
There are dozens of other influences here. The little gadget that scans the environment looks like a cross between No Man’s Sky and the motion sensor from Alien: Isolation. The cars and skeletons piled up in the streets are very The Last of Us, and fighting against wild animals using hand-crafted slings and spears comes straight from Far Cry. It’s visually strong, too, with all the glowing greens and splayed, natural light, and we’re curious to see more from Serum as it boils towards a release date.