First-Person Sporter: Game On For Epigenesis
A new ballgame based around plant seeds
Most current sports were designed around what a couple of blokes could get up to in a field with a ball and, optionally, a few bits of wood. But what about futuresports, for the future when humanity is all glimmering cyberpeople frolicking amongst the stars and definitely not e.g. lost and desperate people fighting over scraps in a world we willingly tore apart? In the future we won't think twice about building ballgame rules around things like gravity cannons and genetically-engineered plants.
That's the stuff Epigenesis is dabbling in, a first-person futuresport which hit v1.0 and came out of Early Access on Friday. I bet Futuresports will do Early Access and everything too.
Futuresports will also be weird and complex things which sound an awful lot like video games, as video games will have stopped being anything weird or special or unfamiliar centuries ago. Futurepeople won't even blink at descriptions like this one from devs Dead Shark Triplepunch:
"In this non-lethal ballgame of the future, players leap across platforms suspended high up in the air trying to get a ball located in the middle of the arena and score goals against their opponents. Each player carries a gravity cannon capable of pushing enemies (and friends) down from the heights of the arena. When a player scores, he receives a genetically modified super-seed and gets the opportunity to plant it onto a platform to capture it. Players capture and construct a node system from their goal post to their opponents'. If that doesn't happen by the time the clock reaches zero, the team with the most goals wins!"
If anything, they'll roll their eyes and say it sounds a bit retro. "Non-lethal?" they yawn. "How quaint! I'd almost forgotten we were ever not nineteen trillion manifestations of the same mind, each as important as a bogey." (Technically, Epigenesis combines both those scenarios I mentioned earlier: futurepeople are settling the fate of the world through high-tech futuresports, as they often do.)
It's up on Steam for £5.94, a bit cheaper than usual thanks to a launch discount. Four copies are £17.84, if you can round some chums up. Observe futuresport: