Harebrained, the studio behind the Shadowrun RPG trilogy and the tactical combat game Battletech, has announced the first project of its post-Paradox era: Graft, a "post-cyberpunk survival horror RPG" set aboard a dying space station overrun by sticky, fleshy monstrosities.
The setting is vaguely BioShock-ish. The Arc, as it's known, was once a technological beacon lighting humanity's path to the future: "a continent-sized station filled with biomechanically enhanced citizens, all working toward some greater purpose lost to time." But of course everything went sideways, and now here you are, one of the few remaining survivors, surrounded by horrors and desperate to escape.
The game world of Graft sounds like my kind of thing. The Arc is filled with "powerful and unsettling" technologies from eons long past, whose secrets you might suss out if you can survive long enough. There are other survivors as well, with whom you can forge "fragile alliances" and maybe deeper relationships, but bear in mind that they're stuck in the same boat you are: "Anyone still living is likely both dangerous and treacherous, and that includes you. The choices you make will shape your journey and decide the fates of those you meet."
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Where it gets really interesting is through the process of grafting: You have the ability to augment and improve your body with "grafts" found hidden throughout the Arc, or blasted off the bodies of your enemies. That's undoubtedly handy, but as always there's a catch. The parts you graft onto your body carry with them small pieces of their original owner's consciousness, and now they're a part of you, bringing with them memories, impulses, and obsessions that are not your own—except now, they are.
"You must choose what each of these fragments means to you," the Steam page says ominously, "and you must live with the consequences of each choice."
Harebrained—formerly known as Harebrained Schemes, but the studio recently decided to drop the "Schemes" part—had a good run through the Shadowrun trilogy and Battletech, an outstanding videogame take on the tabletop classic that's only got better with age. But it ran into trouble with its most recent game, The Lamplighters League, which flopped at launch last year and ultimately led to a split with former owner Paradox Interactive.
Like so many other studios over the past couple years, Harebrained also made significant layoffs prior to the release of The Lamplighters League; the studio said after its break with Paradox that its reduced headcount "led us to revisit the scope of projects which we are exploring with future publishers," suggesting Graft could be a smaller-scale project than some of Harebrained's previous releases. But that's okay: I'll take six hours of "this is awesome" over 20 hours of "let's wrap this up" any day.
Graft doesn't yet have a release date but it will be available for PC on Steam and the Epic Games Store.
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