Cthulhu Smashes The World: Stonehearth
What will we be describing promising games like in the post-post-Minecraft age? What will be zeiting the geist of 2016? I think it'll be something to do with pigeons and cheese: you heard it here first. Meantime, we're still in the post-Minecraft age, and that means attractive and inventive games based around cubist construction/destruction. Latest of those is Stonehearth, currently on the Kickstarters and immediately looking gosh-wow-yes-please. It's a sandbox RTS with at least partially freeform building, and gigantic elder gods.
Best to open with the pitch video, and this is one of those games were moving pictures speak at least 3000 of my caffeine-deprived words:
Now that traditional cRPGs are no longer in short supply, I'm very keen for a wider comeback for singleplayer real-time strategy. We've already got Molyneux's thing inbound, but I'm not comfortable hanging too many of my hats* on that until we know what really lies beyond the MolyneuxPromisesTM. This looks great though, and they seem to have a solid, functioning foundation for it already.
Who are 'they'? You probably won't have heard of San Jose-based Radiant Entertainment before, but they cite this as their heritage:
"In our spare time, we founded the biggest fighting game tournament in the world (the EVO Championship Series, which we've run for over a decade) and wrote GGPO, the network middleware that powers Skullgirls and games by companies like Capcom and Bandai-Namco."
I'm reasonably confident that means they're quite rich, but let's not hold that against them - especially as they're asking for a relatively moderate sum, $120k, for Stonehearth.
Here's some more in-game footage, this time without talking heads.
And another, focused on building:
Many more details on the KS page, which currently has bagged around $78k of its desired $120k. With almost a month left to go, I'm pretty sure they'll make it.
I only own two hats, actually, and neither of them fit properly whenever I have my usually enormous mop of hair cut. IMPORTANT FACTS.