Few things beat hearing about a local success in the games industry, and the folks at Sydney-based studio Weforge are celebrating a massive win with their online multiplayer horror game, Macabre, having blown through an $85,000 AUD funding goal in just 38 hours of the Kickstarter campaign being live.
And there’s little surprise, honestly. In case you’ve not seen it yet, Macabre is aiming to be an incredibly immersive, 4-player cooperative horror shooter experience with stealth and extraction elements and freakishly smart monsters. It throws players into unstable “rifts in time” with a goal to gather resources and then escape while staying clear of the horrific things lurking around them.
Rather than all-out gunfights, Macabre will be about careful preparation and teamwork, with the titular Monster using its cunning to stalk your squad of 4 as you navigate the timelines. It adapts to your behaviours, and so you’ll need to be able to plan and think on the fly. Think Alien: Isolation but with three of your mates and infinite timelines.
Now that the first Kickstarter goal has been reached, there’s hope for a number of stretch goals. The studio plans to release new maps and monsters in waves, so this funding covers the first of each. Following that, more advanced Monster AI and VOIP features will come in, and eventually funding will secure the second location and monster at $250K raised.
The various backer tiers you can opt for naturally have a bunch of in-game and physical rewards available, including my personal favourite the Pet Pack which adds a kookaburra or cockatoo to sit on your shoulders and keep you company (hopefully they’re able to fly away from any real danger). If you’re flush, you can even chuck in a cool $5K USD to have the team craft a playable character based on your likeness.
There’s a heap I could say about the game and the ambitions over at Weforge, or you could just watch the below “Narrative Gameplay” trailer complete with the Aussie-est accents around and see for yourself:
