Promising monster-hunting IF game Southern Monsters now on Kickstarter

Angus directed you towards Southern Monsters last year, and now the ambitious, seemingly massive work of interactive fiction has a Kickstarter you might want to contribute towards. It's the latest piece of IF from the Domovoi and Beneath Floes developer Bravemule, both of which you may have come across via The Best/Free Games of the Week in the last couple of years. From what I've seen of the game on Twitter, Southern Monsters is a much bigger and far more personal adventure, and one that will understandably come with a price tag attached. Its premise, not to mention its pedigree, has me more excited to play than most other titles scheduled for release this year.

Here's that premise, taken from the Kickstarter page:

"Southern Monsters is set across five days in 2005. You play as cripplefoot, a traumatized teen too young to make sense of his emotions. To find the monster, you'll need to strike a balance between cryptid research and cripplefoot's well-being before the dry Arkansas sun sets.

Southern Monsters is deeply personal. It's a dark comedy based on my experiences with online communities, domestic abuse, and being disabled in the weird, weird South. It's also imbued with my love of horror movies like Videodrome, Suspiria, and Eraserhead."

You can chip in to the project here, if your fancy is tickled. With 26 days to go, Bravemule has raised nearly $6,000 of the $8,000 target; there's an estimated release date of October 2017, if all goes well.

Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.