Isometric STASIS follow-up Cayne out now for free and Beautiful Desolation's apocalyptic Africa on the way
What a giraffe
Whoopsie. I was at the beach last week and missed the release of Cayne, the short and free follow-up to isometric horror adventure STASIS [official site]. But I’m back to work today, so here I am to drop the freebie game bomb. Boom. I don’t know if it’s good or not, but Alec enjoyed the original in our STASIS review, even if it had the occasional daft puzzle. “STASIS is all about momentum rather than stop-start headscratching,” he said. “It flows.” This is just one half of my back-to-work newsing though. Creators, The Brotherhood, are also yodelling about a Kickstarter for their new game, Beautiful Desolation [official site], which is halfway to its funding target at this very mo, and has some new trailers to show off.
First, they’ve got a theatrical boyo showing what the gen vibe is, yeah?
You see, it’s an isometric adventure set in a post-apocalyptic Africa, where robots and giraffes walk the same dusty paths, passing rusty cars and generally being very attractive. More clickingly, there’s some gameplay tasters as well.
You’ll play as two brothers, Mark and Don Leslie, along with their four-legged robotic pal ‘Pooch’, who “find themselves in a dangerous world, fighting for their lives”. That sounds like a time-travel set up to me. I’m not a big man for the isometric clickwalks, but this does look very swish, a vibrant future-world that isn’t hardy-har Americana or cables and neon but rather filled with altered animals, tribal homesteads and weird, banjaxed desert landscapes. But it'll be some time before we see it. They have the estimated delivery date on the Kickstarter as October 2019.
Meanwhile, Cayne is set in the STASIS universe and follows a mum-to-be called Hadley who wakes up in a strange medical facility after “what she thought was a routine procedure”. That’s about an hour and a half of free body horror for you.