If you were expecting something like The Typing of the Dead with Sunscorched Studios’ KEYKRUNCHER, guess again. Announced for release on Steam later this year, KEYKRUNCHER sees players enrolled in an experimental treatment programme for their insatiable desire to consume keyboards. Seriously.
“We made RATSHAKER a game about shaking a rat to find your wife,” says Calvin Parsons found of Sunscorched Studios. “Now we’re making KEYKRUNCHER, a game about eating a keyboard, one keycap at a time.”
Set within the RATSHAKER universe, KEYKRUNCHER blends tactile keyboard gameplay, escalating roguelite progression, physical gambling mechanics, desk charms, and Sunscorched’s grimy, high-contrast, PSX-inspired nightmare advert aesthetic into the world’s first keyboard consumption treatment programme.
You have been “fused” to a desk in an assessment room with a scrambled keyboard, a gumball machine, and IT waiting at the end of the hallway. Almost everything on the desk is interactive. Tokens can be taken, machines fed, levers pulled, gumballs handled, and rewards eaten, banked, placed, or survived.
Press the correct keys on your real keyboard, or use the mouse to interact with them, and KRUNCH matching keycaps in-game. Obey the monitor, clear escalating treatment lessons, earn tokens, gamble them away in a sinister gumball machine, and decorate your desk with cursed rewards that might just keep you alive.
Every lesson pushes the treatment further. More keys. Stranger demands. Less time. Riskier rewards. Worse things in the hall. Each run reshuffles the keyboard, demands, rewards, and treatment conditions. Survive the Final Assessment or continue into Endless Treatment until the programme inevitably consumes you.
Players will be able to experience the game with a free demo planned for later this year, ahead of the game’s full release.