Indie studio Eight Points has an interesting game in the making called The Wild Eight .
. It's a survival game made for cooperative play for up to eight players. The isometric title is currently seeking $50,000 on Kickstarter and they've managed to get off to a strong start already on the crowd-funding platform.
The developers hail from what they call one of the coldest and strangest places on the planet, Yakutia, a small republic in the northern region of Russia. It's a harsh place to live and the developers are using that experience to help craft a survival experience out of the upcoming The Wild Eight , which follows eight survivors of a plane crash in the snowy mountains of Alaska. There's a pitch video you can check out below from over on the official Kickstarter page, which further explains the concept of the game and the actual gameplay.
Essentially gamers will play the title as a hybrid strategy-action game. Similar to other games in the genre such as The Forest, Subnautica or Rust , players will gather up food and supplies by scavenging the wilderness for useful resources.
Unlike other games where players will have all manner of fancy weapons at their disposal with a few sticks and stones, ala ARK: Survival Evolved , gamers will have to rely on using things like rocks as throwing weapons and large sticks to beat the crap out of wild animals. Given how crude some of the early weapons are, players will have to use a lot of teamwork when playing cooperatively.
That one scene in the pitch video above where a player was running through some thick snow while a pack of wolves were hounding them down reminded me of the movie The Grey with Liam Neeson. The lighting, the wolf behavior, and the desperation of the player trying to get away was depicted with a nice hint of brilliance. It's moments like that where The Wild Eight could manage to stand out from all the other survival simulators either stuck in Early Access or seeking votes on Greenlight.
It's not all about combat survival, though. The game will have a story mode. You won't just survive endlessly like inthere will be objectives and side-missions for players to complete in addition to building a camp, making fire and desperately fending off survivors from the harsh wildlife of northern Alaska.
The Wild Eight may be yet another game in the somewhat over-saturated survival genre (a genre that's now branching off into the sub-genre of Battle Royale -style survival games like The Culling ) but Eight Points have a unique take on the genre with the setting, the eight-player cooperative play, the isometric view and the fact that it's no longer about fighting off endless hordes of zombies, but simply surviving with basic equipment while facing off against the harshest forms of nature.
I would definitely like to see more of this game, and assuming it can reach its goal of $50,000 on Kickstarter over the course of the next month, we'll likely see the game come to fruition on the Xbox One, PS4 and PC starting December, 2016.
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