A space marine hunts parkour archers as Deathgarden hits early access next week
Urban chic versus military parade dress
Asymmetrical team shooter Deathgarden from Dead By Daylight devs Behaviour Digital will be launching into early access next week. Set in a world of dystopian Hunger Games-esque blood-sport, one player stomps around with a sci-fi gun and a suit of fancy space armour, trying to stop a squad of five agile, hoodie-clad and masked archers from completing their objectives. If the sound of that piques your interest, you'll be happy to hear that for its first week on Steam, starting on August 14th, the game will be free for all to try.
While Deathgarden bears some similarities to Behaviour's previous Dead By Daylight in its asymmetrical power-versus-evasion setup, it looks to be a very different game in practice. The Hunter player (them in the fancy togs with the big shoulder-pads) is pretty much your usual FPS protagonist. Armed to the teeth and packing a bag of sci-fi tricks (including shock-fields, deployable auto-turrets and a variety of weapon modes) their job is a familiar one: Shoot everything that moves, at least until you can capture downed Runners, and have them removed from the field.
The Runner team sound like they've got a somewhat more complex game to play. Playing the game in third-person and blessed with huge agility (they can climb anything, fast), they're tasked with completing various capture-and-hold type objectives around the procedurally generated maps. While it does look like hurting the Hunter is possible, judging by some footage of the closed alpha, it appears that killing them outright is impossible. Runners will respawn unless captured and removed via some sort of creepy Runner-murdering machine. That, at least, is very Dead By Daylight.
Deathgarden's free opening week will begin on August 14th on Steam. After the 21st, it'll cost $30. You can read a little bit more about the game over on its official site here.