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Experience Underground Nightmares with ‘Ergastulum’
It’s a crappy situation when you lose your job anywhere, and it’s no exception in the video game industry. But, there’s always a silver lining somewhere. Take former PlayStation VR developer, Joey To. After nine years, Joey was unfortunately let go. Rather than sit at home, Joey started up K Monkey Games, which released Dungeon Nightmares and Dungeon Nightmares II : The Memory. Now K Monkey is back with a brand new game called Ergastulum, complete with Kickstarter campaign.
Ergastulum is described as “a first-person fantasy horror adventure game” that mixes Asian and Western folklore to “create a terrifying vision that will test a player’s faith to the extremes”. Inspired by the Dark Souls series, as well as Amnesia and Alien Isolation, Ergastulum puts the player in the ergastulum, a Roman underground building used to hold dangerous slaves. In this case, however, the ergastulum also holds terrifying creatures. Armed only with your Crucifix and the Light as your only defence, you must manage your sanity levels as you search for clues in the procedurally-generated locations in order to make it out alive.
As mentioned, the project currently has a Kickstarter page up and running, where the team is asking for £60,000 to complete the game. There are backer rewards available, depending on your pledge level, as well as additional stretch goals if the £60k is surpassed. K Monkey is looking to have the game released next year. To find out more about the game, visit the Kickstarter, or hit up the game’s Steam Page.
UPDATE: In the original version of the story, it was implied that the game was to be a VR-based experience. This is not the case, however. Joey To contacted us to clarify, stating that “[Ergastulum] started off as a VR game but [was] later put on hold and moved to it being a stretch goal. The game is a non-VR experience from launch. 🙂” Sorry for the confusion, folks!
This story was originally posted on Plenty Dreadful. Head there for more horror video game goodness!
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.
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