Eldritch rises once more with the free Reanimated update
Herbert West is at it again!
Cosmic horrors never die, they just sleep, and immersive sim roguelike Eldritch from Minor Key Games has stirred from its slumber. Over the weekend, the game received a major free patch, renaming it to Eldritch Reanimated. It's an across-the-board upgrade, adding new chambers, weapons, tools and monsters, as well as giving the game's code a bit of a spring-clean. As well as being a great reason for a return to the game (Think Dishonored meets Minecraft in Cthulhu-world) this also provides me an excuse to embed Eldritch's incredibly jaunty launch trailer below.
You can see the complete-ish patch notes here on Steam. Under the hood, the game has been upgraded to 64-bit (and hopefully more future-proofed) binaries, and has better support when running at higher frame-rates. There's a few minor quality of life improvements as well, but nothing too dramatic, including warnings when you try to jump into one of the three 'DLC' levels. The main appeal of this new version is the extra stuff crammed into the three already-lively main worlds. "Dozens" of new rooms, a new power, new artifacts and some new monsters including Nightgaunts.
Developer David Lindsey Pittman has been hammering away at this update for ages now, and was planning on rolling it out a little more impressively in the summer. Apparently plans have changed (perhaps something to do with his spooky co-op adventure The Blackout Club?), and so he just unceremoniously shoved it out the door on Saturday. Its long development cycle and prolonged exposure to cosmic weirdness has even corrupted its creator's memory. Reanimated apparently contains a room with a pool of blood that he can't remember the purpose of. Spooky.
Being a cool (if cursed by terrible whispers in the night) guy, Pittman also released the game's source code a while back. If you'd like to plumb the depths of its digital Necronomicon, you can find it here on Github.
Eldritch Reanimated is available on Steam, Humble and Itch for £10/€12/$15. All stores give a Steam key, and the update is currently only on the Steam version of the game.