Indie development duo Beck & Branch Games and publisher Neem Interactive have announced that their viral horror co-op extraction builder GRAIN ROT will be launching next month on Steam on August 7. The game has already been wishlisted almost 200,000 times, and garnered over 350,000 demo downloads during last month’s Steam Next Fest, earning it one of the Top 15 most-played demos during the event.
Set in a scorched wasteland where everything burns, you and up to four friends must descend and break into shifting ruins, rip out furniture, and scavenge for loot for your Outpost base before the Corrupted close in. Make it back alive, then rebuild the Outpost to better your chances for the next run. Of course, in addition to the monsters lurking about, you’ll also need to be wary of your own team, which can leave you high and dry in order to save themselves.
Each time your vessel catches fire or gets smashed to pieces, your Living Spark will need to find and possess a new one, allowing you to keep riding the cursed elevator deeper in the search for loot. Furniture can be smashed to splinters as you use the debris for resources or feed it to the Grinder for gold. The deeper you descend, the worse the Rot becomes. Bodies warp. Voices distort. Emotes become…worse. Or possibly better?
As mentioned, you and your friends can betray each other in order to get out of a jam. Dropkick enemies or “accidentally” launch your ally’s Spark out of their vessel. Block them in a monster-infested corridor or get stuck in the crossfire. However, as you’d expect, the chaos you create can come back to haunt you, so be smart about goofing off.