Although basic info has already been posted about Cult County here by the venerable Jonathan Higgins, new details have surfaced to whet your appetites. While Cult County will be a downloadable game on the 3DS eShop, it will be released in a series of episodes over time, about three episodes per season. Renegade Kid, the developer of Cult County, attests that they are looking to have the complete first season released within a year of the first episode’s release sometime in 2013.
Even though this may bum some people out, since they would prefer to download the entire game at once, the good news is that Renegade Kid pretty much has each episode’s storylines ready. All they have to do now, besides program each specific episode, is fine-tune and add some new gameplay elements. This was announced recently at PAX East 2013, where the studio also said that they wanted to make this game something of a love letter to their original fans, most notably those who enjoyed their two Dementium games.
Other basic news is that, unlike in their Dementium games and their genre-defying FPS Moon, they want to lose their top down HUD in Cult County. This will be done in order to create more of a feeling of immersion in the game’s terror reality. The series will also include indoor as well as outdoor environments, with the indoor being described early on by them as “dusty” with limited visibility. As far as initial story goes, you are searching for a lost relative in a west Texas town dominated by some mysterious cult. Given the nature of cults, players won’t know who to trust, adding to the sense of danger.
Finally, the game will make use of intertwining stories that are both episode and season long, typically ending in cliffhangers. Sounds great to me! If you aren’t already a fan of Renegade Kid and Jools Watsham, just check out Dementium 1 and 2, Moon and Mutant Mudds. You’ll be a quick convert to their particular brand of indie gaming, just as I was.
