Hell's Campbell's: Pixeljunk Inc.
The Pixeljunk games have been one of the best reasons to power up Playstation: The Third for a good while now. Forget the quips of Drake, the mutilations of Kratos, and the red herrings and wild geese of Heavy Rain - Q-Games have been bringing experimental bundles of joy to the platform for years. Eden's arrival on Steam surprised me because I'd assumed the series was Sony 4 Life, but news that the next game in the series would launch on PC pleased us late last year. That the recently released footage of the game shows it to be a procedurally generated, robot-constructing, soup-creation simulator is the icing on the cake.
It's like a hearty broth of co-operative construction, exploration and compelling absurdity. The creatures and plants that live in the depths are living ingredients, which must be squashed, liquidated and lobbed into the factory vats so that new flavours of liquid strength can be created. Turrets can be placed to defend the factory's various workings and the production line can, if the players so wish, be fully automated, with robots lugging the ingredients and finished products from beginning to end.
Playing co-operatively, the game will support up to four players and it'll all run through Steam, with full mod support at or shortly after release.
Whether the management side will have any complexity, it's hard to tell, although the management of 'matter' for construction should offer a challenge. Material is collected as the player explores the caverns beneath the planet's surface and, ingredients aside, it sounds like a single resource is used for everything from robot riveting to factory construction, which should make for some interesting decisions.
The team within Q-Games working on the game are hoping to implement 32-player co-op along with the aforementioned mod support and the whole project is shaping up to be the most ambitious soup-themed game ever created. I certainly can't think of a worthy competitor for the title, although perhaps if Cara 'Soup Journalist' Ellison were here, she'd offer some alternatives.
I have to admit that I was disappointed not to see soup flooding the caverns, using the fluid physics from Pixeljunk: Shooter. Boiling, bubbling tidal waves of meaty liquids.
Via Kotaku.