If you’d been gazing at the present glut of new survival games and bellowing for more, as though engaged in a drinking competition with some kind of cartoon Viking, then rest easy. Gord developers Covenant.dev have announced To The Star, a “whimsical” survival adventure that takes heavy inspiration from Alice In Wonderland, and features a cooking system that lets you blend monster parts with “suppressed emotions”, so as to produce both consumable foodstuffs and weapons.
Yes indeed [engage Dark Souls narrator voice], this is a survival game in which you can blend your id up into a light cream, then stir in some psychedelic snake giblets to create an exploding trauma cupcake, or something to that effect. It certainly beats crafting a Crude Bow for the 2000th time in a row, though I have a feeling the in-game practical application of all this will be “throw a colourful ball of DMG at something”.
The cooking system is one way in which To The Star “sets itself apart from the realism focus of the majority of games in the survival adventure genre,” according to Covenant.dev, which is certainly a goal I can get behind. Here’s some more info on how it all works, straight from the announcement release.
The cooking system will allow for the creation of bizarre dishes from a wide array of ingredients, combining the mundane, like snail slime and snake meat, with the intangible, like suppressed emotions or lost dreams. You can eat those dishes or throw them at your enemy, literally giving him a taste of your feelings and burp of satisfaction right afterward. What’s more, players will be able to create and save their recipes for dishes, concoctions, weapons, and gear by experimenting with different material combinations, provided that they have the proper crafting equipment.
There’s also a “robust” base-building element, except that in this case it’s a “briefbase”, a portable portal to a private dimension where you can build your own house, secure (presumably?) against invasion. The game will feature co-op for up to four players alongside “comprehensive mod support”. The press release makes a big deal of community feedback being “central to the game”.
Hmm. Hmmmm. We weren’t that keen on Covenant.dev’s last game Gord – Sin called it “a detailed and moody setting wasted on a dull and repetitive RTS/management hybrid with the strengths of neither genre” – but it was certainly a rich brew of concepts. Perhaps the dish will come together this time. There’s no release date yet.
