Charm And Chills In A Big Scary World: Hunger
A dollshouse style
We oohed and aahed over the revelation of Hunger [Hunger] in the RPS Treehouse, circling around and holding our hands up to the teaser trailer as if it were a beautiful little fire warming our spirits. It looks like the sort of Eastern European stop-motion short you might find on Channel 4 late at night years ago, coupling a beautiful miniature-ish, dollhouse-y look with a malevolent atmosphere and dreadful monsters in an undersea world called The Maw.
It's an sneak-o-puzzler still early in development, at the prototype stage, but come see this:
Ooh! Isn't that just the ticket? Don't you want to explore and clamber around that giant bathroom? Aren't those doughy chefs horrifying? Isn't that crawling scrabbling shadowy figure just the worst? Swedish developers Tarsier Studios talk of "borrowing the tense atmospherics of survival horror and the playful exploration of adventure games", saying it "aims to capture the thrill and the terror of being small and weak in a world that isn't."
Tarsier have so far mostly helped out on the PlayStation build-o-platformer series LittleBigPlanet, playing a big part in the Vita version. If you have a memory for these things, they were also behind another handcrafted-looking game, The City of Metronome [official site], which was shown off at E3 2005 then slowly sank out of sight.
I wish I could tell you when we might get to play Hunger.