The Eldritch Zookeeper is the Lovecraftian Theme Park you wanted(?)
Run a cursed blight of a zoo for kids!
Do you miss the Theme Park games of old, and how you could torture folks with a lack of public restrooms? Well, imagine that you could do such a thing, but with horrors from beyond the light of our universe, in a godless chasm of The Other from whence order has been long since abandoned? Oh hell yeah, that's the GOOD stuff. Made by indie studio Cranktrain, The Eldritch Zookeeper is an upcoming title that is like a Bullfrog management game gone horribly right and wrong all at once.
As one of those hidden gems on Steam that promises a forthcoming release date, I keep circling back to TEZ, double checking to make sure I haven't missed it. Why? As someone who runs a Darkness Self-Care Podcast and who loved Dungeon Master and who appreciated Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis... well, this feels like it was made just for me. In that it was made so that I could make life a literal living Hell for the plebes that want to give me money.
In The Eldritch Zookeeper you run a zoo packed with unsettling, otherworldly monsters. Deceived by a particularly well-dressed skeleton, a cursed zookeeper is forced to manage a zoo full of eldritch abominations, ideally with as little bloodshed as possible. Can our unfortunate zookeeper break his curse? Every day a new terrifying creature that must be cared for arrives through the interdimensional portal - construct enclosures and keep the monsters fed and reasonably content, and build amenities for the zoo visitors! A Happy Monster Zoo™ is when a creature's teeth/claws/exploding-tendencies are far, far away from the guest's vital organs. They need those! Monster rampages are discouraged.
I don't care that they're discouraged. Imma do Monster Rampages. Who is gonna stop me? (Realizes what creatures might be capable of stopping me.) Ohhhhhhh.
Check out the trailer below IF YOU DARE. (You dare; it is quite cute.)
Here's the most recent dev blog/update from just a few weeks back, showing off Levitation and fog and a few other detail tweaks on the horizon.
You can follow along with the game's development over at the Store Of Steam!