“The game will explore what life is like in a dying world”, reads the Kickstarter for action adventure game, Ashen Rift.
You play as one of the last humans, in the proper sense of the word, left on Earth. For a decade, a portal called the Rift has threatened existence. On top of that, it’s also spewed forth monsters, and turned humans into creatures known as Feeders.
Most of the people still alive have succumbed to ennui or barbarism, but there are a few who still resemble who they once were, before the Rift. Among those few is a a man and his dog, Bounder, somewhere in the US mid-west.
The goal of the game will be to journey to the portal in order to, somehow—you don’t seem to know how—save the world.
AR reminds me a lot of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, not just because of the dog’s presence but also because of the post-apocalyptic milieu, and the inversion of Man’s place in the world—the human has become the “Other”, while the abominations have become the norm. (Let’s hope the game doesn’t have as disappointing of an ending as the movie did. Butterflies?)
I won’t go into analyzing the game at this point, as there’s not much to analyze, except to point out that it seems to be a great, big, gigantic meditation on and metaphor for death and entropy.
The title’s an FPS, and seems to have some idiosyncratic weapons to offer players. Bounder will apparently serve the role of a walking inventory screen.
Ashen Rift has already been greenlit on Steam. The Kickstarter‘s a quarter of the way to the finish line, and if you’re interested in helping the developer, Pyroclastic, cross that line, you can go there. The developers have expressed an interest in porting the game to PlayStation (first) and Xbox (second) if the funding goes well enough.
