News
Round Table Games Makes a ‘Deal With the Devil’
Tell me if you’ve heard this one before.
Earlier this year, a handful of industry veterans came together to found an indie studio, and their debut game is going to be of the horror persuasion. Sound familiar? It should. Some of our most anticipated horror games are coming from indie devs that were founded by industry vets, including Perception, Inner Chains and Outlast II.
It’s clear that gamers want more original horror games, and it just so happens that there’s a disproportionally large number of experienced game developers who are leaving bigger studios in order to make horror games. It’s a lovely thing to see, and I have a feeling this trend won’t be slowing down anytime soon.
Round Table Games was founded earlier this year by former Blizzard, Riot Games and ZeniMax devs, making it the latest indie startup to spring up in this manner. They’ve only just begun working on their first game, but we already have our first details.
Developed in collaboration with Anti-Matter Games, Deal With the Devil is an Unreal Engine 4-powered horror game that’s coming to PC and consoles. It “aims to bridge the gap between narrative-driven experience and first-person horror” by providing gamers with “a story-rich, first-person globetrotting journey through the sinister side of the Roaring Twenties.”
Set just after the first World War in a world that’s been devastated by the Spanish Flu, the game follows a woman named Amelia Woods, who “walks the tightrope between Champion and Anti-Hero.” We don’t yet know what makes her special, but whatever it is, she’s been tasked with solving the “mysteries of ancient, forbidden places, hidden beneath the Art-Deco Glamour of a world filled with eldritch horrors.”
Coincidentally, Deal with the Devil is the second horror game set during the apocalyptic Spanish Flu that I’ve written about today.
No word on a release date, but I suspect it’s still a ways off.
All of us here at Bloody Disgusting are deeply saddened to learn that George A. Romero Foundation Founder and President Suzanne Desrocher-Romero has passed away.
GARF shared in a statement on socials, “It is with a heavy heart that we announce the passing of Suzanne Desrocher Romero. Suzanne passed away of natural causes on June 24 at her home in Toronto after a prolonged illness.”
The statement continues, “Suzanne was the fierce leader of the George A. Romero Estate and The George A. Romero Foundation. She worked tirelessly to preserve George’s legacy. Her work at the foundation will continue to inspire and live on for generations to come. The family asks for privacy at this time.”
Desrocher-Romero founded GARF in 2018, after her late husband’s passing in 2017, and has been a fierce advocate for his legacy and the arts. It was her mission to “strengthen horror as a serious field of global study,” and she was a tremendous fighter on behalf of Romero’s works and supporting new filmmakers inspired by his legacy.
It was Desrocher-Romero who spearheaded the recovery and restoration of The Amusement Park, and, as the person in charge of the George A. Romero estate, worked closely with author Daniel Kraus on completing unfinished novels like Pay the Piper and The Living Dead. She most recently celebrated the restoration of her favorite of Romero’s zombie films, Day of the Dead, and was hard at work producing the upcoming film Twilight of the Dead.
That passionate advocacy led to Suzanne Desrocher-Romero becoming family to Bloody Disgusting as well.
2023 marked the start of an ongoing partnership between Bloody FM and GARF on The Dead, a scripted audio series spanning multiple seasons that saw Desrocher-Romero working closely with the Bloody FM team and mentoring the series’s contributing writers with GARF. To say her loss will be felt internally is an understatement.
“Anytime George Romero is mentioned is good, because what we are doing is to provide a healthy legacy. We’re uplifting his legacy, we’re supporting the archive, and we’re also supporting the Horror Study Center. So, all of these three things are what the Foundation is striving to do. As far as I’m concerned, the more we say George Romero’s name, the better it is,” Desrocher-Romero recently told BD.
It’s the perfect encapsulation of her unwavering enthusiasm for supporting Romero’s legacy and the horror genre, and just a glimpse at how much she contributed to preserving it. She is, in short, an inspiration.
We send our deepest condolences to Suzanne Desrocher-Romero’s family, friends, and GARF.
You must be logged in to post a comment.